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enAhmed, "An Unlimited Intercourse": Historical Contradictions and Imperial Romance in the Early Nineteenth Centuryhttp://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/containment/ahmed/ahmed.html
<div class="field field-name-field-published field-type-date field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth"><span class="date-display-single" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth" content="2000-11-01T00:00:00-05:00">November 2000</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/praxis/containment/index.html">The Containment and Re-deployment of English India</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><div align="center">
<h2>The Containment and Re-Deployment of English India</h2>
<h3>"An Unlimited Intercourse": Historical Contradictions and Imperial Romance in the Early Nineteenth Century</h3>
<h4>Siraj Ahmed, Texas A&amp;M University</h4>
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<p>'We might assume that late-eighteenth-century British writers described their new empire in India in terms of Enlightenment concepts of progress. In fact, until the 1790s, they tended to associate it, on the contrary, with moral and political degeneration, acutely aware that the despotic politics of imperialism-and in particular of the East India Company-were in conflict with the civil principles of the British state. In the early nineteenth century, with parliament&#8217;s decision simultaneously to end the EIC&#8217;s monopoly by opening the colonies to British free merchants and to permit British evangelicals to establish missions there, the nature of the empire began to change: the British public now had an opportunity to play an economic and spiritual role in the empire. The effect of this reform, though, was not simply to align British imperialism with the civilizing mission. Rather, it was to internalize the conflict between the principles of the nation-state and the politics of empire so that it resided <i>within</i> the empire: now the economic and moral aspects of the empire, superintended by the British nation, separated from the political aspect, which remained in the hands of the EIC. The former staked the claims of "modernity"; the latter rationalized its politics by insisting that it was concerned to preserve native "traditions."</p>
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<p>Sydney Owenson&#8217;s early-nineteenth-century historical novel <i>The Missionary: an Indian Tale</i> is of particular interest in regard to this transitional period, since it was the first novel to represent the problem of colonial India in terms of a conflict between modernity and tradition, rather than between principles of the nation-state and the politics of empire. In order to produce this new vision of the colonial encounter, which depends on late Enlightenment and Romantic Period concepts of history, <i>The Missionary</i> needed to offer a correspondingly new narrative form that effaced a fact that eighteenth-century writers rarely could: in the colonies, Indian "traditions" were a mask constructed by the colonial society. The notion that the colonial encounter is a contest between modernization and traditional culture continues to vex our understanding of imperialism and globalization, as well as of early modern attitudes toward empire, leading us to believe that we speak for the colonized when we speak in the name of their traditions, as if these traditions somehow remain unmarked by the history of imperialism.</p>
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<p><b>Section One: The Politics of Conquest and the Civilizing Mission</b></p>
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<p>In 1805, Claudius Buchanan, the chaplain for the East India Company settlement at Calcutta, wrote <i>Memoir of the Expediency of an Ecclesiastical Establishment for British India</i>, which called for "civilizing the natives" (29)<sup><a name="back1" href="#n1" id="back1">[1]</a></sup>. Although the East India Company had established the colonial government in Calcutta four decades earlier in 1765, it prohibited missionary activity, and the <i>Memoir</i> was the <i>first</i> statement by a Company official calling for the evangelism of the native population<sup><a name="back2" href="#n2" id="back2">[2]</a></sup>. While we have come to assume that imperialism was the means by which the European nation-state spread its civilization to the non-European world, or at least by which it extracted surplus revenue under the pretense of spreading its civilization, the early history of British India requires a different narrative.</p>
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<p>In the preface to the <i>Memoir</i>, Buchanan writes:</p>
<blockquote>every character of our situation seems to mark the present &#230;ra, as that intended by Providence, for our taking in to consideration the moral and religious state of our subjects in the East; and for Britain's bringing up her . . . arrear of duty, and settling her account honourably with her Indian Empire. (2)</blockquote>
<p>If the present moment is one which Buchanan is convinced contains particular theological significance, he makes clear that the redemption it offers pertains not only to the Hindus, but to the British as well<sup><a name="back3" href="#n3" id="back3">[3]</a></sup>. While Hindus in general have not yet had the opportunity to receive the gospel, Britain&#8217;s participation in the mercantile imperialism of the eighteenth century constitutes a wandering from the Faith, an "arrear of duty." By placing sovereign power over its Indian territories in the hands of a mercantile company, the British state had produced an empire that appeared to be a caricature of the state, a commercial society bereft of a moral foundation. In Buchanan&#8217;s vision, evangelism does not inspire British imperialism, nor does it mystify Britain&#8217;s exploitation of India. Rather, evangelism compensates India for the East India Company's ruthless extraction of its wealth; Buchanan asks rhetorically: "From [India] we export annually an immense wealth to enrich our own country. What do we give in return? (40). By "settling her account" with India, Britain also settles its account before God, finally redeeming itself from the sins of its eighteenth-century empire. Buchanan's <i>Memoir</i> discusses the project of "civilizing the natives" in its second part, only after it has discussed the more urgent project of "preserving the profession of the Christian religion among our countrymen in India" (1) in its first and so suggests in its very organization that we should see in the rise of British evangelism in India not the moral confidence that we might assume underwrote Britain's imperial claims, but rather a moral condemnation of the East India Company&#8217;s eighteenth-century empire. British imperialism has been degenerate; now it must be reformed.</p>
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<p>Evangelism steps onto British India's stage later than one would expect, because, as Hannah Arendt has argued, the civilizing mission and the politics of empire are to an extent mutually exclusive<sup><a name="back4" href="#n4" id="back4">[4]</a></sup>. Although we tend to assume that European colonialism always fundamentally involved a civilizing mission, the East India Company's government in India explicitly avoided such a project throughout the eighteenth century. The Company believed that any attempt to anglicize the natives would offend their religious sensibilities, leading to unrest, political instability, and hence decreased revenue. The reforms of Lord Cornwallis (Governor-General of India, 1786-1793) were the only prominent exceptions to this general policy. Cornwallis was a parliamentary appointee, not a former Company servant, and London had chosen him to clean up the Company's corruption in the wake of Edmund Burke's allegations about Warren Hastings's administration (1772-85). Cornwallis reformed administration by removing all natives, whose influence was identified as a source of corruption, from important bureaucratic positions, and by centralizing power in the hands of British "collectors" who exercised their authority at a distance from the villages they governed<sup><a name="back5" href="#n5" id="back5">[5]</a></sup>. At the end of Cornwallis's administration, the Act of Permanent Settlement reformed land-management by imposing what has been referred to as a Whig theory of property upon Bengal, securing the property rights and fixing the rents of a native aristocracy, in the hope that it would become a class of improving landlords<sup><a name="back6" href="#n6" id="back6">[6]</a></sup>. But even these reforms were contested by forces within the Company, both in India and in England, as soon as they were established.</p>
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<p>Lacking, among other things, the hindsight that the twentieth century provided Arendt, Buchanan nonetheless has an awareness of this opposition, realizing that the Company did not concern itself with "the moral and religious state" (xvi) of its Indian subjects, because such a project did not serve its economic interests: "Did we consider their moral improvement equal in importance to tribute or revenue, we should long ago have attempted it" (31). Buchanan imagines an official of the East India Company articulating its political philosophy:</p>
<blockquote>"It is easy to govern the Hindoos in their ignorance, but shall we make them as wise as ourselves! The superstitions of the people are no doubt abhorrent from reason; they are idolatrous in their worship, and bloody in their sacrifices; but their manual skill is exquisite in the labours of the loom; they are a gentle and obsequious people in civil transaction." (41)</blockquote>
<p>According to Buchanan, the colonial government preserves Hindu traditions that it recognizes are morally degenerate, because these traditions compel obedience to authority, while an education in the principles of civil society would inspire the native population to resist its servility. In fact, during the late eighteenth century, the Company not only refused to civilize the natives, but in order to support its tenuous authority, itself adopted Hindu as well as Islamic social and political forms. The very title the "British Raj" inscribes the colonial government&#8217;s persistent ambivalence toward the civilizing mission and its belief that its own political stability depended on its continuity with Indian traditions. But for Buchanan and the early critics of the British empire in India, the East India Company&#8217;s investment in Hindu traditions placed the Company beyond the pale of the British nation, into the shadowy realm of oriental despotism. In other words, for its eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century critics, the British empire in India embodied not European progress, but rather something closer to the degeneracy of eastern tradition; Buchanan exclaims: "can it be gratifying to the English nation to reflect, that they receive the riches of the East on the terms of chartering immoral superstition!" (41).</p>
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<p>The civilizing mission that first began to emerge in British India in the early nineteenth century had two components: one was evangelism, while the other was liberalism, which, calling for an end to the East India Company&#8217;s monopoly, claimed that British commerce freed from mercantile constraints would push India forward on the scale of nations. In a pamphlet entitled <i>A View of the Consequences of Laying open the Trade to India to Private Ships</i>, an advocate for the Company, Charles Maclean, argued against free trade on the grounds that it would inevitably lead to the end of the empire. Maclean believed that if Britain's middle classes were to gain the privilege of free trade with British India, they would establish "an unlimited intercourse" with it and that this unregulated exchange relationship would lead them in turn to colonize it. Such colonization, Maclean insisted, "would weaken, or obliterate" the very "characteristic features of the native inhabitants" that made the British empire possible in the first place (200)<sup><a name="back7" href="#n7" id="back7">[7]</a></sup>. In one passage, Maclean parodies an orientalist scholar's respect for traditional Indian culture:</p>
<blockquote>The division of the natives of Asia into numerous casts, and the principle of perpetuity which pervades this distinction, if one may so speak, constitute a source of security to the permanence of our East Indian Government, hitherto unparalleled in the history of the world; and, as there is no great probability that mankind will ever again be edified by a similar ph&#339;nomenon, it is rather a pity that we should be in any particular hurry to adopt measures, which might prematurely destroy it. (201)</blockquote>
<p>This passage is a succinct expression of the fundamental contradiction of modern imperialism&#8212;the conflict between the civilizing mission and the politics of empire&#8212;as it played itself out in early British India. The paradox emerges here in the fact that Maclean&#8217;s argument implies that imperialism and colonization are inimical to each other, that the project of empire must of necessity have nothing to do with the assimilation of the subject people<sup><a name="back8" href="#n8" id="back8">[8]</a></sup>. And Maclean&#8217;s irony serves to emphasize the paradox. Maclean feigns respect for the caste system, claiming that it is without historical parallel and that it edifies mankind, but he undoubtedly recognizes that the British tended to see it as a manifestation of Hindu "prejudice," India&#8217;s want of reason and hence of social progress. The irony implicit in treating the caste system with a deference normally reserved for ancient British liberties underscores the fact that this tradition becomes worthy of respect only when one appreciates that it is the foundation of Britain&#8217;s political and economic presence in India, "a source of security to the permanence of our East Indian Government." It is also from this perspective&#8212;which is simply too unprincipled for Maclean to adopt without irony&#8212;that progressive reform movements like evangelism and liberalism become, regardless of the benefits they might confer on the native population, a "pity," since they would "prematurely destroy" the caste system, subverting it before the British have had sufficient opportunity to take material advantage of it. Because it can defend the mercantile empire only by acknowledging, however ironically, that it is founded upon prejudice, this passage inscribes the fundamental opposition between the principles of the nation-state and the politics of empire, which was especially prominent during this transitional moment in imperial history.</p>
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<p>Far from signalling a shift in the Company's attitude toward anglicization, Buchanan&#8217;s <i>Memoir</i> sparked a public debate in 1807 among the Company's shareholders and in the London periodical press that highlighted the tense relationship between the civilizing mission and imperial politics. Maclean's pamphlet was part of another extensive metropolitan debate that expressed this tension, one that took place in the years immediately preceding parliament's 1813 renewal of the Company's charter, in which advocates for the Company's monopoly confronted its opponents, both in parliament and in print. The 1813 charter, with which parliament finally ended both the Company's monopoly on Indian trade (which the Company had first received from the British state more than two centuries earlier), and the Company's prohibition on missionary activity in India, marked a watershed in the history of British imperialism<sup><a name="back9" href="#n9" id="back9">[9]</a></sup>. Parliament in effect transformed the public rationale behind British imperialism in India fundamentally: while the eighteenth-century merchant empire justified itself merely in terms of the revenue it provided the British state, 1813 in effect finally inaugurated the civilizing mission in British India. The civilizing mission was born only after a controversial half-century of colonial rule during which, in works like Buchanan&#8217;s <i>Memoir</i>, metropolitan print culture repeatedly emphasized the discrepancy between the civil principles of the nation and the practices of its empire<sup><a name="back10" href="#n10" id="back10">[10]</a></sup>. But the reforms of 1813 did not end this contradiction. Rather, they rearticulated it, so that it became no longer simply a conflict between metropolitan civil society and imperial colony, but rather one that also existed <i>within</i> empire, between the liberal and evangelical advocates of the civilizing mission on one hand and the colonial adminstrators
who saw native traditions as the necessary prop for a government whose origins, like the veiled ones of civil society itself, had always been in conquest.</p>
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<p><b>Section Two: A Footnote to the History of Empire</b></p>
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<p>While the debate on Buchanan&#8217;s pamphlet was still underway, reports reached London about a mutiny against British authority that had taken place in the South Indian town of Vellore, involving two months of unrest in the Madras native army that culminated in a revolt on July 10, 1806, in which native mutineers killed or wounded 200 of the 370 person British garrison. A historian of early-nineteenth century British India, C.H. Philips, claims that the Indian soldiers interpreted the Company's attempt to regulate their facial hair and dress as one more sign that the British intended ultimately to eliminate Hinduism from India, when in fact the regulations were intended only to insure a uniformity of appearance among the soldiers. Regardless, the Company's Directors used the mutiny as an opportunity to promote their case against missionaries, representing it as the consequence of the inevitable offense that any evangelical activity would cause native sensibilities<sup><a name="back11" href="#n11" id="back11">[11]</a></sup>. The Chairmen of the Court of Directors claimed that the mutiny originated in "opposition to the innovations in the customs and religious institutions of the sepoys, fanned to heat by general rumours of their forced conversion to Christianity" (Philips 160).</p>
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<p>Philips notes that "The question of converting the natives of India to Christianity was at that time supposed to depend for its solution upon the origin of the massacre at Vellore" (169)<sup><a name="back12" href="#n12" id="back12">[12]</a></sup>. The struggle to interpret the uprising at Vellore included more than twenty-five authors in a pamphlet war and eventually led to the involvement both of the <i>Quarterly</i> and <i>Edinburgh Reviews</i>. Like those about Buchanan&#8217;s pamphlet and the East India Company&#8217;s monopoly, the debate on the Vellore Mutiny was one more example of the discursive conflict between the principles of the civilizing mission and the politics of empire.</p>
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<p>Unremarked by subsequent historiography or criticism, the Vellore uprising becomes a footnote to <i>The Missionary: An Indian Tale</i><sup><a name="back13" href="#n13" id="back13">[13]</a></sup>, published by the internationally famous author of <i>The Wild Irish Girl</i> (1806)<sup><a name="back14" href="#n14" id="back14">[14]</a></sup>, Lady Sydney (Owenson) Morgan, in 1811. <i>The Missionary</i>'s footnote to the Vellore uprising draws a parallel between the novel&#8217;s setting, Portuguese Goa in the seventeenth century, and contemporary British India. Although Morgan's critics have not remarked upon the footnote, it turns out to be the case less that Morgan uses the Vellore mutiny to gloss her novel about seventeenth-century Portuguese India than that she uses her novel to gloss the Vellore mutiny, upon the interpretation of which the future of the civilizing mission in India seemed to depend.</p>
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<p>But as its title suggests, the novel responds not only to the debates about the Vellore mutiny, but also to those about Buchanan&#8217;s pamphlet: as if responding to Buchanan&#8217;s widely discussed call for the evangelism of British India by offering a lesson from history, the novel describes the voyage of the Portuguese monk Hilarion first to the Portuguese colonial territory of Goa as the <i>Apostolic Nuncio</i> of India, and then to the remote independent province of Kashmir. While in its representation of missionary activity and native resistance, the novel responds directly to the debates about Buchanan&#8217;s pamphlet and about the Vellore mutiny respectively, its date of publication places it in the midst of the metropolitan arguments that led up to the 1813 renewal of the Company&#8217;s charter. Hence, with <i>The Missionary</i>, another voice entered the conflict between the civilizing mission and imperial politics. But in <i>The Missionary</i>, imperial rule becomes the coercive attempt to <i>uproot</i> Indian traditions in the name of the civilizing mission. So <i>The Missionary</i> and the period in which it was written, in contrast to the literature of the late eighteenth century, mark the emergence of a specifically modern vision of the colonial encounter that effaces the traditional eighteenth-century association of imperialism with degeneration and with an awareness of the fundamental contradiction between imperialism and civil society. In other words, <i>The Missionary</i> serves the historical function of rearticulating the fundamental contradiction inherent in imperialism in terms of a basic romance plot. Eighteenth-century writers tended to argue, in various forms, that imperialism's renegade capitalism threatened the civil principles that were supposedly the foundation of the nation-state. The historical function that <i>The Missionary</i> serves is absolutely crucial, inaugurating the modern trope that would replace this
eighteenth-century discourse, representing the imperial encounter as an often violent romance between civil society and native traditions.</p>
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<p><b>Section Three: The Rise of the Historical Novel and Imperial Romance</b></p>
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<p>Why does <i>The Missionary</i> efface the discrepancy between civil society and the imperial colony on which late eighteenth-century literature placed so much emphasis? One reason is that, unlike the <i>Memoir</i>, which responds to Buchanan's experience of colonial politics, <i>The Missionary</i> instead clearly reflects the development of historical consciousness in early nineteenth-century European culture. Taking issue with Luk&#225;cs's championing of Scott as the inventor of the literary genre that first articulated modern historical consciousness, Katie Trumpener has argued that, in her early novels, such as <i>The Wild Irish Girl</i> and <i>The Missionary</i>, it was Morgan, who along with Maria Edgeworth, set the precedent for the historical novel<sup><a name="back15" href="#n15" id="back15">[15]</a></sup>. Locating one source of modern historical consciousness in Scottish and Irish responses to Enlightenment programs for economic improvement that were seen to be imperialist, Trumpener's study of the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century British novel in particular argues that the emergence of historical consciousness is intimately related to the experience of empire as a form of modernization or economic incorporation. One form that this response to internal colonialism took was the philosophical discussion of national development patterns, the most famous of which was the Scottish Enlightenment's four-stage theory<sup><a name="back16" href="#n16" id="back16">[16]</a></sup>. The four-stage theory simultaneously narrated history and geography, since it claimed that one could map social development not only diachronically, but also synchronically across space.</p>
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<p>With its "intense interest in local color, customs, and attachments, " the early nineteenth-century novel placed these late eighteenth-century philosophical discussions into novelistic form, and the four-stage theory in particular lent itself to two narrative forms: the national tale, which according to Trumpener "maps developmental stages topographically," since "the movement of these novels is geographical rather than historical"; and the historical novel, which is "obsessed with [. . .] historical processes that [. . .] uproot traditional cultures" and hence which represents diachronic change (165, 141, 141, 167). If the focus of the historical novel is the modernization of traditional cultures, it is not surprising that it makes empire one more example of such processes, especially since its model for empire is internal anglicization. Even if one adopts Luk&#225;cs's different but complementary account of the preconditions of the historical novel's rise&#8212;that is, historical consciousness developed during the Napoleonic Wars, when the propaganda of war across Europe attempted to justify war in terms of national development&#8212;the model of empire (in this case, the supposedly abstract rationality of the Napoleonic Empire) remains a modernizing force (Luk&#225;cs 23-24). In other words, by the early nineteenth century, the relationship between imperialism and modernity or the civilizing mission appeared much less complicated in metropolitan culture than it was in point of fact in British India and than it had appeared throughout the eighteenth century.</p>
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<p>Trumpener claims that, while Morgan's earliest novels are national tales, <i>The Missionary</i> is a transitional form between the national tale and the historical novel, since it represents both a British periphery as a distinct stage in the progress of civilization and the historical processes that transformed this "life world," and she notes further that <i>The Missionary</i> is particularly representative of the historical novel, since it "highlights the thematics of colonialism, domination, and forced modernization beginning to emerge in the genre as a whole" (167, 146). Whereas the late-eighteenth-century novel could not imagine the British empire in India as an agent of progress, because it saw only violence, not liberal commerce, as the force that generated imperial expansion, the development of historical consciousness in metropolitan literary culture during the early nineteenth century engendered another possibility for the representation of empire.</p>
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<p>On one level, <i>The Missionary</i> is clearly a displacement of Morgan's preoccupation with Ireland, with the Indian heroine Luxima, the High "Priestess" of a Brahman sect, taking the place of the heroine of <i>The Wild Irish Girl</i>, Glorvina, a Celtic "princess," both of them embodiments of their respective national traditions<sup><a name="back17" href="#n17" id="back17">[17]</a></sup>. But the novel is also a genuine attempt to project the form of the historical novel that Morgan was in the process of inventing onto the new space of colonial India, with its significantly different, non-European culture. During the period of her life when Morgan wrote <i>The Missionary</i>, she served as a governess in the household of the marquis of Abercorn, who had collected a large library of the orientalist works that had come out of colonial India during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries<sup><a name="back18" href="#n18" id="back18">[18]</a></sup>. Morgan annotates <i>The Missionary</i> with extensive references to these works, and this kind of "scholarly" footnote, which would become a common literary apparatus as the historical novel continued to develop, served to authorize her reconstruction of Indian culture as arrested at a certain historical stage in the progress of human society.</p>
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<p>Soon after he arrives in the isolated province of Kashmir in order to carry on his missionary labors, the Portuguese monk Hilarion fixes all of his proselytic efforts on Luxima on the premise, he insists to himself, that if he can convert a "high priestess," all of her disciples and then the nation as such will follow. The narrative makes clear, though, that what actually drives Hilarion's tireless energy in pursuing his designs on Luxima is not his devotion to the Catholic Church, but rather his frustrated and sublimated sexual desire. Since the entrance into civilization for Hilarion in particular and for the civil self in general depends upon the placement of an essential "restraint" upon basic human passions, it follows that Hilarion and the civil self always experience a frustration that threatens to erupt outside civil society.</p>
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<p>The greater part of the novel describes Hilarion and Luxima's romance, which&#8212;although always unconsummated and for his part undeclared&#8212;leads the Inquisition to sentence him to burn at the stake, the climax of the novel. The romance is of course an allegory of the colonial encounter and it participates in a topos common to the nascent historical novel that Trumpener has discussed. In fiction not only by Morgan, but also by Edgeworth and Charles Maturin, a "national marriage plot" re-enacts the Act of Union between England and her internal colonies on the one hand and Ireland on the other that took place in 1800 (Trumpener 137). With Morgan in particular, the national marriage plot offers the possibility of "union" not only between different and apparently opposed national cultures within the British empire, but also between different historical stages in the progress of human society. The stadial theory of history leads inevitably to calls for a reconciliation between pre-civil states of nature and modern civil society, the reconciliation (or romance) within which human fulfillment supposedly lies.</p>
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<p><b>Section Four: The Stages of National Progress</b></p>
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<p>The footnote that refers to Vellore glosses a passage that claims the coercive proselytism of Goa's Catholic Church was on the verge of provoking a native insurrection, and it remarks in passing:</p>
<blockquote>An insurrection of a fatal consequence took place in <i>Vellore</i> so late as 1806, and a mutiny at Nundydrag and Benglore occurred about the same period: both were supposed to have originated in the religious bigotry of the natives, suddenly kindled by the supposed threatened violation of their faith from the Christian settlers. (248-9)</blockquote>
<p>This footnote is a concise portrait of the colonial encounter, and it happens also to encapsulate the basic terms of the novel's larger dramatization of this encounter. The words that introduce the footnote, "An insurrection took place in <i>Vellore</i> so late as 1806," imply that Morgan believes that the Vellore mutiny reflects the same basic tension that her novel explores and hence that she offers her novel as an explanation of the conditions that provoked the Vellore mutiny. The footnote suggests that the conditions that provoked the mutiny are the coercive nature of European colonial rule&#8212;or, one could say, civil society's violent attempt to transform the pre-civil world&#8212;and Hindu "religious bigotry"&#8212;or the irrationality of the pre-civil world. Brief as it is, the footnote nonetheless successfully reduces the colonial encounter to a confrontation between two different historical stages of civil progress. In its portraits both of the romance between Hilarion and Luxima and of the colonial encounter between the Europeans and the Indians, the novel is founded upon the categories of premodern irrationality and modern reason, and hence it is an elaboration of the footnote, and by extension of Morgan's interpretation of the Vellore mutiny.</p>
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<p>During the period in which Morgan sets <i>The Missionary</i>, the early seventeenth century, the imperial relationship was especially complicated, because while Goa was a Portuguese colonial territory, Portugal itself had recently become a province of the Spanish Empire. Hence, her choice of Goa as a setting enables Morgan to discuss two kinds of imperialism: not only that which obtains between Europe and India, but also that which occurs within Europe's borders. The retrospective placement of the imperial relationship in seventeenth-century Goa enables Morgan, more specifically, to gesture toward the present realities not only of British imperialism in India, but also of British imperialism in Ireland <i>and</i> of the Napoleonic Empire on the European continent. Morgan in fact opens her narrative by placing it in the context of Spanish imperialism in Portugal:</p>
<blockquote>In the beginning of the seventeenth century, Portugal, bereft of her natural sovereigns, had become an object of contention to various powers in Europe. . . . Under the goading oppression of Philip the Second, and of his two immediate successors, the national independence of a brave people faded gradually away, and Portugal, without losing its rank in the scale of nations, sunk into a Spanish province. (1)</blockquote>
<p>The quotation makes clear that Portugal already possessed the attributes of an independent nation-state <i>before</i> Spain subjected it to imperial rule. Under its "natural sovereigns," Portugal had progressed to the leading edge of the "scale of nations." Luk&#225;cs notes that the propaganda of war during the Napoleonic years popularized the idea that the nation's character and hence by extension its independence require the preservation of its history. Early nationalist thought imagines that imperial rule suppresses this history and galvanizes the popular masses to resist imperial rule by reconstructing the nation's glorious past<sup><a name="back19" href="#n19" id="back19">[19]</a></sup>. In the case of imperialism within Europe, whether Spain against seventeenth-century Portugal or Napoleonic France against the European continent, at least from the perspective of early-nineteenth-century historical consciousness, imperial rule can serve only to suppress those ancient traditions that are intrinsic to the nation's character. Early nationalist thought responds to Enlightenment theories of civil progress by claiming that the basic human passions that civil society by definition restrains and hence frustrates can gain a formed of refined fulfillment only if the general model of civil society is not coercively imposed on the nation, but rather respects and preserves the particular character of the nation's ancient traditions. But, as we shall see, Morgan believes that imperial rule does serve a function in India, because India's history, regardless of its virtues, does not contain the seeds of the nation-state.</p>
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<p>When Morgan first describes the colonial state of Goa, she continues her portrait of the Portuguese as, ironically, the victims of colonization, rather than its agents:</p>
<blockquote>The places under the civil and ecclesiastical government of Goa were filled by Spaniards, but the Portuguese constituted the mass of the people. They groaned under the tyranny of the Spanish Jesuits, and they heard, with a rapture which their policy should have taught them to conceal, that an apostolic nuncio, of the royal line of Portugal, and of the order of St. Francis, was come to visit their settlements, to correct the abuses of the church. (17)</blockquote>
<p>This passage illustrates Morgan's vision of imperial rule as coercive, especially within Europe, where it cannot serve a civilizing function. Morgan envisions the coercion of imperial rule in terms of an analogy with the repression of physical desire produced by the restraints that civil principles place on the body. Directed by an abstract civil rationality, the imperial government is analogous to the mind and specifically to conscience. In contrast to her representation of imperial governments, Morgan here emphasizes the collective affective life of the national masses and hence implies that they are analogous to the body. Their "groans" under "the tyranny of the Spanish Jesuits" express the sufferings of the body under the repressions of conscience. The rapture they feel at the possibility of being governed by their "natural sovereign," who embodies their traditions, points, on the other hand, toward the sort of transcendence possible only when mind and body are organically related. In other words, while imperial rule produces a disjunction between body and mind, alienating the population from the state, in the organic nation-state, political rationality is continuous with popular desire, the state's civil law evolving through history from the nation's premodern traditions.</p>
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<p><b>Section Five: The Romance Allegory</b></p>
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<p>In the case of European rule in India, the disjunction is more pronounced, because the colonized nation is at a historical remove from the imperial state. From the perspective of a four-stage theory that culminates in a utopian vision of the unfettered exercise of reason, the Indian national masses, arrested at an earlier historical stage, are even more imprisoned within their bodies than the European. <i>The Missionary</i>'s romance allegory elaborates the idea that imperial instability is analagous to a mind-body dualism and emphasizes the gap between European reason and Indian affect. Within the allegory, Hilarion is of course the figure of European state rationality, and Luxima of Indian national culture. As a child, Hilarion had what one would have thought was the misfortune to be placed in a monastery, but he immediately discovered that monastic values agreed with his own precocious desire to overcome the body and by extension nature: he "sighed to retire to some boundless desert, to live superior to nature, and to nature's laws, beyond the power of temptation, and the possibility of error; to subdue alike the human weakness and the human passion" (4). Even more directly than etymology suggests, Hilarion's sublimation of his physical desire has its roots in an aesthetics of the Sublime. His premature introduction to monastic life serves as a parable of Enlightenment concepts of civil progress from the perspective of the Romantic period. Within this perspective, the principles of civil society serve not to rationalize the body's ruling passions but rather to turn them against themselves, producing a kind of masochism. Morgan portrays Luxima, on the other hand, as the very embodiment of sensuality (however chaste), and hence adds more than a hint of sexual <i>frisson</i> to Hilarion's missionary labors:</p>
<blockquote>To listen to her was dangerous; for the eloquence of genius and feeling, and the peculiar tenets of her sect, gave a force to her errors, and a charm to her look, which weakened even the zeal of conversion in the priest, in proportion as it excited the admiration of the man. (85)</blockquote>
<p>So while Hilarion is a caricature of modern civil society, of the aspiration toward unfettered reason, Luxima is a caricature of pre-civil life, of subjectivity imprisoned within the body. Not only does Morgan's characterization of Europe and India in terms of diametric opposites explain the sexual tension that drives the romance but it also purports to explain the cultural tension that destabilizes imperial rule.</p>
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<p>Hilarion does finally begin in fact to surrender his missionary "zeal" to his manly "admiration," and in doing so he redefines the significance of the narrative: now his romance with Luxima is an allegory no longer of imperial instability, but rather of the possibility of a union of different historical stages. In this union, Hilarion as modern man recovers the possibility of the affective life that he has long since renounced in his desire to master nature, to demystify its enchantment, the "force" of its "errors" and the "charm" of its "look." Morgan describes the effect that his undeclared love for Luxima and his life in edenic Kashmir have upon Hilarion:</p>
<blockquote>nature had now breathed upon his feelings her vivifying spirit: . . . the sentiment which had at first imperceptibly stolen on his heart, now mastered and absorbed his life. He now lived in a world of newly connected and newly modifed ideas; every sense and every feeling was increased in its power . . . and he felt himself hurried away by new and powerful emotions which he sought not to oppose, and yet trembled to indulge. (107)</blockquote>
<p>Pre-civil life, with all of its enchantment, enables Hilarion finally to overcome the alienated subjectivity that Morgan suggests is characteristic of civilized society. Trumpener notes that the "novels of Owenson's and Maturin's middle periods envision cross-cultural marriage as a form of countercolonization" (137)<sup><a name="back20" href="#n20" id="back20">[20]</a></sup>. In fact, Morgan explicity represents Hilarion's transformation as the revolution (in the literal sense), not of the colonized nation against imperial rule, but rather of Nature against the usurped authority of civil society:</p>
<blockquote>[Hilarion] had brought with him into deserts the virtues and the prejudices which belong to social life in a certain stage of its progress; and in deserts, Nature, reclaiming <i>her rights</i> unopposed by the immediate influence of the world, now taught him to feel her power through the medium of the most omnipotent of her passions. (107, my emphasis)</blockquote>
<p>Where Enlightenment philosophers imagined not that civil society simply represses the body's passions, but rather that it refines them into the rational interests that generate modern economic activity, Morgan presupposes that the movement into advanced civil society entails the overcoming of the body as such, that civil society is the site of abstract reason rather than of rationalized passions. Hence, when "Nature" revolts against civil society here, it does so not in the form of passions revolting against the limits civil society has placed on them, but rather in the form of the body&#8212;articulated in terms of a conventional eighteenth-century model of nerves and sensibility&#8212;simply becoming aware of itself once again, as it had been in mythic consciousness<sup><a name="back21" href="#n21" id="back21">[21]</a></sup>.</p>
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<p><b>Section Six: An Ignorant Non-Age</b></p>
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<p>But if this victory of Nature over Reason in the context of romance enables modern man to regain his affective life, it comes at great cost in the very different context of political struggle. It is precisely the domination of Nature&#8212;in other words, mythology&#8212;that withholds the Indian nation from the course of world-historical progress and that explains the necessary failure of the Hindu uprising that ends the novel. The passage that introduces the uprising elaborates the footnote&#8217;s reference to native "religious bigotry":</p>
<blockquote>The arts used by the Dominicans and the Jesuits for the conversion of the followers of Brahma . . . had excited in the breasts of the mild, patient, and long-enduring Hindus, a principle of resistance, which waited only for some strong and sudden impulse to call it into action. (248)</blockquote>
<p>The Hindus are "mild, patient, and long-enduring"&#8212;or in Buchanan&#8217;s terms, "a gentle and obsequious people"&#8212;because they lack a rationality capable of critiquing political domination and promoting autonomy. Whatever its source, "the principle of resistance" that lies barely dormant in the Hindu "breast" is not reason; their uprising expresses, not a rational critique of imperial rule, but rather only a reaction to "some strong and sudden impulse," a largely spontaneous outburst, rather than a premeditated and organized strategy. In the political sphere, the enchantment of nature, the domination of the body, leads to violent anarchy, rather than to national independence.</p>
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<p>Morgan literally sets the stage for the Hindu uprising, by placing religious irrationality in general and Hindu irrationality in particular on its foreground. Near the novel's close, the Goan Inquisition imprisons Hilarion for his alleged indiscretions with Luxima and is about to burn him at the stake, when Luxima, herself having just escaped from imprisonment, discovers him. Delirious from her detention, Luxima imagines that Hilarion is her husband and that the Inquisition fire is his Hindu funeral pyre. She then attempts to commit sati&#8212;the ritual practice of "voluntary" widow-burning that had assumed a sensational place in the British literary imagination since the initial years of colonial rule&#8212;in the Inquisition fire<sup><a name="back22" href="#n22" id="back22">[22]</a></sup>. In the shared element of fire, the irrationality of the Inquisition and of Roman Catholicism blurs into the irrationality of sati and Brahmanical Hinduism.</p>
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<p>Luxima's delirium contrasts with the clear-sighted reason of Hilarion, who saves her from this confused sati, presumably against her own wishes: "She sprang upon the pile: . . . the multitude shouted in horrid frenzy&#8212;the Missionary rushed forward&#8212; . . . he snatched the victim from a fate he sought not himself to avoid" (260). Hilarion's intervention in sati is a perfect emblem of the European civilizing mission. Hilarion saves Luxima from a "fate" that her religion dictates for her and in doing so, he offers her the opportunity to critique this religious dogma and this fate and thereby to regain her historical agency, to master fate. In British eighteenth-century fiction about India, such as Mariana Starke's 1791 play <i>The Widow of Malabar</i>, the British colonist rescuing the Brahman widow had become a commonplace tableau<sup><a name="back23" href="#n23" id="back23">[23]</a></sup>. But the point we need to recognize is that while both <i>The Widow of Malabar</i> and <i>The Missionary</i> justify imperial rule in terms of a civilizing mission that manifests itself particularly at the scene of sati, they in fact misrepresent the colonial government's policy toward sati and hence its relationship to the civilizing mission. Ironically, the East India Company made it official policy to prohibit British intervention in sati precisely because it feared that proscribing a practice that claimed to have authoritative scriptural foundations and hence the status of an "ancient right" would subvert the very basis of its authority. It was only in the 1820s that colonial administrators would debate the official policy toward sati and only in 1833 that they would outlaw the practice<sup><a name="back24" href="#n24" id="back24">[24]</a></sup>. This transformation from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century, in which the British intervention in sati went from occuring in literature to being actual colonial policy, is significant: it marks the gradual
entrance of the civilizing mission into British India, against the protests of many officials within the East India Company.</p>
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<p>When Hilarion breaks free from the grasp of the officers of the Inquisition to save Luxima, they attack him, but the dagger they aim at his heart finds Luxima's instead. It is this unintentional stabbing that provides the "impulse" for the Hindu uprising. The uprising is supposed to evidence that the "principle of resistance" concealed in the Hindu breast is a passion or an irrational consciousness that, when provoked, can only strike out violently and hence ineffectually, resistance somehow short of historical agency. The Hindu masses attack the Inquisition at a moment in which it had <i>not</i> offended them. As the irrationality of the Inquisition had blurred into that of sati, Luxima's delirium blurs into that of the Hindu crowd. What Morgan had insinuated about Vellore in the footnote, she makes the truth of her own recreation of Vellore: the uprising is a product of zealousness inadvertantly provoking a violence always latent in irrational or mythic consciousness:</p>
<blockquote>the timid spirits of the Hindus rallied to an event which touched their hearts, and roused them from their lethargy of despair; . . . to avenge the long-slighted cause of their religion, and their freedom;&#8212;they fell with fury on the Christians. . . .</blockquote>
<blockquote>Their religious enthusiasm kindling their human passions, their rage became at once inflamed and sanctified by their superstitious zeal. (261)</blockquote>
<p>The irrationality of the Hindus' judgment leads of course to an equally irrational uprising. Note Morgan's choice of words: beginning in "their hearts," the uprising is vengeful, furious, enthusiastic, enraged, inflamed, and superstitious. Morgan creates binary oppositions between not only Luxima's madness and Hilarion's clear-headedness, but also the "credulous" and "superstitious" Hindu rebels and the professionalized Spanish soldiers: "the Spaniards fought as mercenaries, with skill and coolness; the Indians as enthusiasts, for their religion and their liberty, with an uncurbed impetuousity; . . . the Hindus were defeated" (262). The Spaniards are more effective, because they act out of self-interest, rather than out of a collective delusion. The binary between the Spaniards and the Hindus projects onto a collective level the binary between Luxima and Hilarion.</p>
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<p>The stadial theory of civil progress opposes the mythic subjectivity of feudal societies to the civic rationality of advanced commercial societies. The former subjectivity takes humanity out of its natural state of war, in Hobbes's term, without ever cultivating its critical faculty. Rather, mythology suppresses humanity's aggressive passions by subjugating them to the apparently overwhelming power of physical nature and fate. Hence, when humanity in the mythic state does act out its rulings passions in whatever form its religion inspires, these passions remain the still savage ones of natural man, incapable of aspiring toward civil society. In the representation of the imperial encounter in <i>The Missionary</i> at least, the stadial theory produces a romantic exchange that privileges mythic consciousness as the source of subjective fulfillment and a political exchange that privileges civil rationality as the source of historical progress.</p>
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<p>Like Morgan, Claudius Buchanan had also argued that though Hindus appeared "timid," their timidness was just another expression of a mythic or "superstitious" consciousness, an infatuation or enchantment that denies them historical agency and that can only manifest itself as rage:</p>
<blockquote>You will sometimes hear it said that the Hindoos are a mild and passive people. They have apathy rather than mildness; . . . They are a race of men of weak bodily frame, and they have a mind conformed to it, timid and abject in the extreme. They are passive enough to receive any vicious impression. . . . In the course of the last six months, one hundred and sixteen women were burnt alive with the bodies of their deceased husbands within thirty miles round Calcutta, the most civilized quarter of Bengal. But independently of their superstitious practices, they are described by competent judges as being of a spirit vindictive and merciless; exhibiting itself at times in <i>a rage and infatuation</i>, which is without example among other people. (37, my emphasis)</blockquote>
<p>In Morgan's and Buchanan's images of the Hindu, timidity will always turn into violence, because both the mildness and the violence manifest an inability to act effectively. If it is "religious enthusiasm" that kindles their "passions," the Hindus possess only superstition, not the knowledge necessary to effect a desired outcome. The "apathy" to which Buchanan refers is the logical consequence of their lack of agency. The "lethargy" and the "despair" with which Morgan characterizes the crowd also reflects their inability to believe in their own agency. The representation of irrational violence, both in the <i>Memoir</i> and in <i>The Missionary</i>, implies the necessity of colonial intervention in Hindu culture, refuting the countervailing vision of Hinduism as a gentle religion that should not be disturbed. But to the extent that Morgan agrees with Buchanan, she in fact aligns herself not with the colonial government, but rather with its critics. While the colonial government depended on what it considered to be a native infatuation with traditional forms of political authority, as it did throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it could not afford to represent native traditions as a form of mythic consciousness. Instead, even as it attempted to take advantage of these traditions, the colonial government took pains to publish the codifications of indigenous law that insisted the basic civil principle of private property was an ancient Indian right. The colonial government could not allow itself to accept the view that Hindu traditions merely reflected infatuation, because its government was based on these traditions.</p>
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<p>In fact, though, the early British anthropology of Hindu culture could not resist reducing it to pre-civil forms of barbarism, to the kind of tendency toward self-destruction that precedes the establishment of the social contract. Like <i>The Missionary</i>'s conclusion, where the Hindus&#8217; fanaticism leads in the end to their own slaughter, British writers drew attention to the practice of self-inflicted torture. Take, for example, the account that Lord Teignmouth, the president of the group of largely amateur orientalists that gathered in Calcutta as the famed Asiatic Society, gave of the Hindus&#8217; "revengeful spirit":</p>
<blockquote>In 1791, <i>Soodishter Mier</i>, a <i>Brahmin</i>, the farmer of land paying revenue, and tenant of tax-free land in the province of <i>Benares</i>, was summoned to appear before a native officer, the duty collector of the district where he resided. He positively refused to obey the summons, which was repeated without effect; and after some time several people were deputed to enforce the process, by compelling his attendance. On their approaching his house he cut off the head of his deceased son's widow, and threw it out. (<i>Asiatic Researches</i> 335)<sup><a name="back25" href="#n25" id="back25">[25]</a></sup></blockquote>
<p>From the perspective of this passage, the Brahman clearly participates in a pre-bourgeois culture that responds violently to the prospect of shame, like the European aristocrat who responds to an insult of his honor by demanding justice in the form of a duel. But the Brahman exaggerates the absurdity of the aristocrat, because the gap here between the "insult" and the violence of the response is absolutely incommensurable. Teignmouth continues his narrative of Brahmans who literally lose their heads in their desire for revenge by describing two more instances of domestic violence, recounting the testimonies of a man who killed his daughter and another who committed matricide:</p>
<blockquote>"I became angry . . . and enraged at his forbidding me [to plough the field]; and bringing my own little daughter <i>Apmunya</i>, who was only a year and a half old, to the said field, I killed her with my sword." (<i>Asiatic Researches</i> 335-6)</blockquote>
<blockquote>Beechuck . . . drew his scymetar, and, at one stroke, severed his mother's head from her body; with the professed view, as entertained and avowed by both parent and son, that the mother's spirit . . . might for ever haunt, torment, and pursue to death <i>Gowry</i> and the others concerned with him. (<i>Asiatic Researches</i> 337)</blockquote>
<p>Teignmouth's anecdotes construct a stereotype of the Brahman that explains why the colonial government was so wary of encroaching on traditional Indian culture. Each of the acts that Teignmouth recounts is supposed to manifest a resistance to authority but in fact constitutes a violation of the most basic filial affections and hence manifests a self-destructive tendency. From the perspective of this stereotype, Brahmanical subjectivity, unable to critique and reform government rationally, can only respond to government as a form of violence in kind; as Buchanan notes, Hindus are "passive enough to receive any vicious impressions" (37)<sup><a name="back26" href="#n26" id="back26">[26]</a></sup>. The Hindu will imagine a violence in the operations of authority even when it is absent, and it will respond to authority simply by repeating this violence. But because the Hindu's passions have not been rationalized, his response to government is even more violent and much more perverse than the attempts to govern him were in the in the first place, and hence it only precipitates civil degeneration<sup><a name="back27" href="#n27" id="back27">[27]</a></sup>.</p>
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<p>Alongside Morgan's portrait of the Hindu uprising, Buchanan's account of the Brahmanical "revengeful spirit" (37) suggests that European and Indian national traditions bear very different relationships to modern civil society. About the Portuguese revolution against the Spanish Empire, Morgan writes:</p>
<blockquote>the spring of national liberty, receiving its impulse from the very pressure of the tyranny which crushed it, . . . produced one of the most singular and perfect revolutions which the history of nations has recorded. (1)</blockquote>
<p>Morgan presupposes that national traditions in Europe have already been rationalized by the Enlightenment or that they have the benefit of reason and hence that the national spirit in Europe can enter history as a revolutionary force, providing a people who have the critical capacity to form a civil society the sovereignty they deserve. When we recognize that from the perspective of Morgan and those who supported the civilizing mission in India, Indian traditions simply lacked reason as such, we will not be surprised that though Morgan was known internationally for her celebration of national traditions, she could not help but believe that Indian traditions were precisely what withheld India from independent nationhood and the inevitably teleology of world history. From her perspective, any Indian revolution against colonial rule will be premature, a still irrational outburst leading only to fruitless violence<sup><a name="back28" href="#n28" id="back28">[28]</a></sup>. It is only colonial rule that can introduce reason into Indian national traditions and in doing so enable India to enter history<sup><a name="back29" href="#n29" id="back29">[29]</a></sup>.</p>
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<p><b>Section Seven: Preserving Native Traditions</b></p>
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<p>The romance plot rejoins the political subplot in the sense that it is only after the European has regained his affective life that he can rule India properly, respecting her traditions, in order to rationalize them upon a European model. By the novel's end, both Luxima and Hilarion express their visions of a reformed colonial rule that would reconcile a certain respect for Indian traditions with imperial rationality. Luxima presents her vision to Hilarion in her last words, before she dies from the stab wound, calling on him to undertake a different kind of proselytic project:</p>
<blockquote>"when <i>I</i> am no more, thou shalt preach, not to the Brahmins only, but to the christians, that the sword of destruction, which has been this day raised between the followers of thy faith and of mine may be for ever sheathed! Thou wilt appear among them as a spirit of peace, teaching mercy, and inspiring love; thou wilt sooth away, by acts of tenderness, and words of kindness, the stubborn prejudice which separates the mild and patient Hindu from his species; and thou wilt check the christian's zeal, and bid him follow the sacred lesson of the God he serves." (273)</blockquote>
<p>The reconciliation of the different historical stages in civil progress enables colonial rule to appeal to the heart, to construct an affective relationship with the premodern subject. In its emphasis on the necessity of a sympathetic foundation for colonial rule, Luxima's vision responds precisely and no doubt intentionally to the governing principles that supposedly inspired the Vellore uprising.</p>
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<p>Hilarion also insists that colonial rule must be sympathetic toward the native. To the Jesuits who will eventually turn him in to the Inquisition, he declares:</p>
<blockquote>"It is by a previous cultivation of their moral powers, we may hope to influence their religious belief; it is by teaching them to love us that we can lead them to listen to us; it is by inspiring them with respect for our virtues, that we can give them confidence in our doctrine." (226)</blockquote>
<p>But while Luxima calls only for the elimination of Hindu prejudice, the violent unreason that the uprising manifested, Hilarion, like Buchanan, believes that Hinduism simply is irrational, and searches for the method by which Hinduism can be "perfectly eradicated" (181) and "universally subverted" (184). For Hilarion, the affective relationship between colonist and colonized becomes in part the method that undoes the intricate interweaving of Hinduism with native subjectivity and that prepares the premodern subject for the exercise of a critical rationality; once the native achieves this rationality, he can and must abandon his traditions. While the early historical novel and post-enlightenment historical consciousness in general imply that tradition must be respected, because the nation-state cannot be founded on abstract reason alone, <i>The Missionary</i> argues that in the case of India, colonial rule must respect native traditions for the purely pragmatic reason of providing the civilizing mission an opening gambit. Within this image of the imperial encounter, India's national traditions do not inform but rather oppose the values of the nation-state, and hence the construction of an advanced civil society entails their ultimate destruction.</p>
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<p><b>Section Eight: Constructing Native "Tradition"</b></p>
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<p>It is a telling irony that though Morgan had an international reputation as an opponent of British colonialism, <i>The Missionary</i> promotes the civilizing mission more wholeheartedly than the British colonial government itself did. While the evangelical movement called for the establishment of missions in India as part of a broad project of anglicization that purported to insure that colonial rule served not to exploit the native population but rather to secure their prosperity, East India Company officials in general vehemently opposed evangelism in particular and anglicization in general, because they believed that such projects would provoke insurrection and destabilize their authority. Hence, even after parliament gave official support to missionary activity with its 1813 renewal of the East India Company charter, Company bureaucrats, who continued to govern India on the ground, showed little sympathy for missionaries. For example, both the Governor of Bombay, Mountstuart Elphinstone, and the Governor of Madras, Thomas Munro, opposed missionaries, with Munro actively punishing administrators who used their positions to spread Christianity<sup><a name="back30" href="#n30" id="back30">[30]</a></sup>. While the evangelical movement in colonial politics legitimized its concern to promote Christianity by placing it under the banner of the civilizing mission, Company officials legitimized the political and social structures upon which their authority depended by placing them under the banner of the defense of Indian tradition.</p>
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<p>In his seminal study of nineteenth-century imperial ideology, <i>The English Utilitarians and India</i>, Eric Stokes refers to the new generation of colonial administrators who emerged in reaction to the beginnings of the civilizing mission in the early nineteenth century as "romantic"<sup><a name="back31" href="#n31" id="back31">[31]</a></sup>. According to the historical narrative of Stokes and Bearce, a romantic ideology motivated these administrators&#8212;who included most prominently, Elphinstone, Sir John Malcolm, and their mentor, Munro&#8212;in the sense that they opposed the abstract political principles established by Cornwallis's anglicizing reforms, including the Act of Permanent Settlement, with the supposedly Indian custom of personal government, which created a sympathetic bond between ruler and ruled, and secured the peasant in traditional village India<sup><a name="back32" href="#n32" id="back32">[32]</a></sup>. But Stokes and Bearce are taking these EIC officials at their word: their writings reinforce this narrative of their ideology, implying that their sensitivity to Indian tradition is the only means to insure the spread of Enlightenment, to prevent a premature Indian revolution. The following quotations are taken from, respectively, Thomas Munro in 1813; Elphinstone; and Malcolm, his successor as Governor of Bombay:</p>
<blockquote>When we have gained their attachment by mild and liberal treatment, they will gradually adopt from us new customs and improvements, which under a severe and suspicious government they would have rejected.</blockquote>
<blockquote>It is not enough to give new laws, or even good courts; you must take the people along with you, and give them a share in your feelings, which can be done by sharing theirs. (Bearce 134)</blockquote>
<blockquote>All that Government can do is . . . by adapting its principles to the various feelings, habits, and character of its inhabitants, to give time for the slow and silent operation of the desired improvement, with a constant impression that every attempt to accelerate this end will be attended with the danger of its defeat. (Stokes 23)</blockquote>
<p>In this emphasis on a sensitivity to tradition that will serve as the sympathetic foundation to colonial rule, one can hear precise echoes of both Luxima's and Hilarion's visions of a conciliatory colonialism and in particular of Hilarion's premise that sensitivity to Indian tradition is the only means to prevent a premature Indian revolution and hence to insure the spread of Enlightenment. Furthermore, Munro and Malcolm share the belief Buchanan expresses that there is a latent and easily provoked violence in Indian irrationality, and consequently, they also deduce from this belief the principle that the colonial government must first humor Indians, expressing sympathy for their traditions, before it attempts to civilize them.</p>
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<p>But in his recent study of Thomas Munro, without criticizing Stokes directly, Burton Stein argues that the motivation behind the system of property ownership and administration that Munro devised and established, which became the dominant models in British India, was neither to preserve native traditions of property as the basis of a reconstructed civil society nor to treat the Indian peasant with romantic benevolence, but rather to eliminate all intermediate indigenous property owners and political authorities who could possibly compete with Company power; Stein comments: "Munro was proposing nothing less than the completion, by administrative means, of the military conquest of the Baramahal territory. . . it was the perceived task of civil administration in the Baramahal to divest ancient local lordships of any capacity to resist or overturn Company rule" (59)<sup><a name="back33" href="#n33" id="back33">[33]</a></sup>. Stein suggests that the kind of comments that Munro and his bureaucratic disciples made in defense of their administrative policies as sensitive to the traditions of India have fed into a propagandistic historiography that celebrates this sort of colonial administrator and this period of colonial rule as especially benevolent (46-8). This celebration depends on a confusion whose origins <i>The Missionary</i> marks: the premise that the colonial encounter is the inevitable confrontation of tradition and the civilizing mission, a confrontation that can be represented in terms of two <i>individuals</i> and that always risks being coercive and leading to the oppression of the nation, but that can always be conciliatory, leading both to the historical fufillment of the nation and the subjective fulfillment of modern consciousness. In fact, of course, neither side of the colonial encounter could be properly considered individual or unitary; the terms "tradition" and "modernity" in fact empty the colonial encounter of its history. The peculiar history
of early British India suggests instead that rather than the stage where the civilizing mission and tradition play out the dramatic script of historical necessity, the imperial encounter is in fact precisely where imperial rule <i>creates</i> the intractable historical legacy of native traditions, in order to support its essential opposition to the civilizing mission. That is to say, the <i>modern</i> construction of "native traditions," one more cunning artifice of civil progress, attests to the fact that the imperial encounter always threatens to reveal the most naked images of civil society's own violent origins.</p>
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<p>Notes</p>
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<p><a name="n1" id="n1"> </a><sup>1</sup>&#160;&#160;All references to the first American edition of Buchanan's <i>Memoir</i>. <a href="#back1">back</a></p>
<p><a name="n2" id="n2"> </a><sup>2</sup>&#160;&#160; For historical background to Buchanan's appointment, see Embree, especially 141-2 and 189-90, and for historical background to the publication and reception of the <i>Memoir</i>, see Philips, 159-60. <a href="#back2">back</a></p>
<p>The movement that eventually succeeded in gaining missionaries access to India first surfaced in colonial politics during the 1790s, when William Wilberforce attempted to introduce a clause sanctioning the establishment of evangelical missions in British India into parliament's 1793 renewal of the East India Company's charter. Although Henry Dundas, president of parliament's Board of Control on Indian Affairs, was predisposed to this clause, the combined protest of the Company's governing elite, or "Directors," and its largest shareholders, or Proprietors, presented an insurmountable obstacle to Wilberforce's efforts. The grounds upon which the Company vehemently opposed the missionary clause&#8212;as "unwisely expending the Company's money and as dangerous to the peace and good order of the British possessions in India"&#8212;could serve as a summary statement of the Company's attitude toward the civilizing misson throughout the eighteenth century, with its purely pragmatic concern with the Company's finances, its awareness of the extreme instability of Company rule, and hence its refusal to promote what it considered to be an idealistic and inevitably offensive evangelism. </p>
<p>In 1804, Charles Grant, a leading member of the politically influential Clapham Sect of evangelicals and a former servant of the Company, was elected to serve as a Deputy Chairman of the Company, thereby giving evangelicals their first powerful advocate within the Company itself. Grant appointed evangelicals to posts in India, one of whom was Claudius Buchanan.<a href="#back2">back</a></p>
<p><a name="n3" id="n3"> </a><sup>3</sup>&#160;&#160;There were also pragmatic reasons that the present had such potential theological significance. The East India Company had finally defeated its primary rival, Tipu Sultan, and hence could be more confident of its political stability, even when it was accompanied by missionary activity. Furthermore, with Napoleon's blockade of Europe's markets, India suddenly gained very clear significance to British manufacturers and merchants. In 1813, a group of Cutlers from Hallanshire petitioned against the EIC's monopoly by insisting upon the importance of British India as a market to the the nation in general. They called for free trade in order "to render our country so far independent of commerce with rival nations, that, whether at war or at peace, we may have the strength and resources within ourselves to conduct the former with glory and success, and to enjoy the latter with honour and security." See the anthology of documents relating to early British India, P.J. Marshall, ed., <i>Problems of Empire</i>, 222. The need to cultivate Indian taste so that it would buy British manufactured goods was an additional justification for evangelism. <a href="#back3">back</a></p>
<p><a name="n4" id="n4"> </a><sup>4</sup>&#160;&#160;See Arendt, especially Part Two, "Imperialism," and in particular Chapter Five, "The Political Emancipation of the Bourgeoisie," 123-57. <a href="#back4">back</a></p>
<p><a name="n5" id="n5"> </a><sup>5</sup>&#160;&#160;Metcalf's <i>Ideologies of the Raj</i> contains a description of Cornwallis's administrative reforms, 20-4. <a href="#back5">back</a></p>
<p><a name="n6" id="n6"> </a><sup>6</sup>&#160;&#160; Ranajit Guha's <i>A Rule of Property for Bengal</i> is probably the most widely read discussion of this reform. <a href="#back6">back</a></p>
<p><a name="n7" id="n7"> </a><sup>7</sup>&#160;&#160;Maclean notes that "an unlimited intercourse, by Private Ships, with India, would inevitably lead to the colonization of that country; which could not but terminate in its separation from Great Britain" (200). <a href="#back7">back</a></p>
<p><a name="n8" id="n8"> </a><sup>8</sup>&#160;&#160; In 1801, a special committee of the EIC's Court of Directors itself published a report in which it also argued against free trade as a form of dangerous colonization that would eventually lead to a violent uprising: "Even now, the society of merchants in India discover a wish to be emancipated from every material restraint: that spirit would live and be more powerful in the larger society. Governments, then, would find it a new and arduous task to maintain order and subordination. [. . .] That the rights and usages of our native subjects might not be encroached upon in this progress, that these people, though passive, might not be at length exasperated, and that they might not, from example, gradually lose their habits of submission to government, no man can be warranted to deny: [. . . .] a vast mass of native subjects, thus put into a new state of agitation, [. . .] might render it extremely difficult for this country to maintain, in that remote quarter, a government sufficiently strong and energetic to contain all these interests within their due bounds." See Marshall, 220. <a href="#back8">back</a></p>
<p><a name="n9" id="n9"> </a><sup>9</sup>&#160;&#160; Advocates of the civilizing mission gained a hearing in colonial politics only during the first years of the nineteenth century, because the Company's expansionist wars had greatly increased its debt, and hence compromised its influence in parliament. What we take to be essential to colonialism was in fact the product of a specific historical conjuncture: the decline of the Company's finances and the rise of evangelical and liberal reform movements in British society. But even after parliament ended the Company's monopoly, opening India to private British trade, and permitted officially-supported missionary activity with its 1813 renewal of the Company's charter, it left the Company to administer the colonial government. Hence, advocates for the civilizing mission would always confront Company servants who had final say in determining the shape of colonialism and whose interests did not necessarily lie with modernization. <a href="#back9">back</a></p>
<p><a name="n10" id="n10"> </a><sup>10</sup>&#160;&#160; Cain and Hopkins note: "Utilitarians treated the empire as a vast labratory for experimenting with scientific principles of human betterment; missionaries came to see it as a crusading vehicle for collective salvation. Together, they created a new international order in the nineteenth century by devising and implementing the world's first comprehensive development programme" (35). <a href="#back10">back</a></p>
<p><a name="n11" id="n11"> </a><sup>11</sup>&#160;&#160;Hence, both in its inspiration and in the colonial government's conservative response to it, the Vellore mutiny prefigured the Great Mutiny of 1857. <a href="#back11">back</a></p>
<p><a name="n12" id="n12"> </a><sup>12</sup>&#160;&#160;To recognize that the civilizing mission was not the inevitable scapegoat for colonial instability, one need only recall the 1770s and 80s, when both Edmund Burke and Adam Smith, as examples among many others, held the private interests of the Company's servants and of the Company itself as a purely mercantile concern responsible for the Company's inability to create public institutions that could properly govern Britain's imperial territories in India. <a href="#back12">back</a></p>
<p><a name="n13" id="n13"> </a><sup>13</sup>&#160;&#160;Joseph Lew notes that <i>The Missionary</i> "attracted critical and political opprobrium as well as an unprecedented audience" and that it "went through one American and four London editions in its first year." See Lew 39-65, 40. <a href="#back13">back</a></p>
<p><a name="n14" id="n14"> </a><sup>14</sup>&#160;&#160;Sensationally popular, <i>The Wild Irish Girl</i> had made the Irish Morgan a spokesperson for Irish nationalism and a publicly recognized critic of British imperialism. Morgan's novel helped popularize the concept that Irish nationalism was rooted in traditional folk culture. Morgan also expressed her sympathy for the principles of the French Revolution&#8212;principles which sat uneasily with her idealization of national tradition&#8212;in her 1817 travelogue <i>France</i>. This work, along with her support for Irish nationalism, helped cement her reputation as a dangerous radical, the constant object of the literary press's villification, which Chamberlain claims eventually began to undermine her celebrity in the 1830s, after she had already published more than twenty works of poetry, fiction, and nonfictional prose. See Kathleen Reuter Chamberlain and Carol Hart. <a href="#back14">back</a></p>
<p><a name="n15" id="n15"> </a><sup>15</sup>&#160;&#160; See "National Character, Nationalist Plots: National Tale and Historical Novel in the Age of Waverly, 1806-30" in Trumpener, <i>Bardic Nationalism</i>, 128-57, especially 128-32 and 138-46. <a href="#back15">back</a></p>
<p><a name="n16" id="n16"> </a><sup>16</sup>&#160;&#160;See for example Adam Smith, 14-16 and 201-21, for a description of the different stages of society. <a href="#back16">back</a></p>
<p><a name="n17" id="n17"> </a><sup>17</sup>&#160;&#160;All citations are from the American first edition of <i>The Missionary</i>. <a href="#back17">back</a></p>
<p><a name="n18" id="n18"> </a><sup>18</sup>&#160;&#160;See Campbell, 102-10. <a href="#back18">back</a></p>
<p><a name="n19" id="n19"> </a><sup>19</sup>&#160;&#160;See Luk&#225;cs, 25: "The appeal to national independence and national character is necessarily connected with a re-awakening of national history, with memories of the past, of past greatness, of moments of national dishonour, whether this results in a progressive or a reactionary ideology." <a href="#back19">back</a></p>
<p><a name="n20" id="n20"> </a><sup>20</sup>&#160;&#160;Trumpener speculates further that the Irish national tale tends to have a radical edge that its generic spin-off, the Scottish historical novel, lacks, because the Irish, whose union with England was nearly a century younger than the Scottish, had not been as fully assimilated in the British empire, and she also notes that while Edgeworth's national tales were pro-Union, Morgan's had Jacobin tendencies. See 132. <a href="#back20">back</a></p>
<p><a name="n21" id="n21"> </a><sup>21</sup>&#160;&#160;In a sense, Luxima <i>converts</i> Hilarion from his missionary consciousness to a Hindu subjectivity. Along with this figurative conversion, Hilarion literally converts Luxima to Christianity, but in diametric opposition to Hilarion's conversion, Luxima's is clearly only rhetorical. Gauri Viswanathan has analyzed this conversion in terms of the "critique of religious absolutism as source of both colonial and patriarchal oppression" that it inscribes. See 27-31. <a href="#back21">back</a></p>
<p><a name="n22" id="n22"> </a><sup>22</sup>&#160;&#160;For discussions of eighteenth-century British writing about sati, see Teltscher, 51-68, and Nussbaum, 167-91. <a href="#back22">back</a></p>
<p><a name="n23" id="n23"> </a><sup>23</sup>&#160;&#160; <i>The Widow of Malabar</i> is an adaptation of Lemiere's <i>La Veuve du Malabar</i>. <a href="#back23">back</a></p>
<p><a name="n24" id="n24"> </a><sup>24</sup>&#160;&#160;For a discussion of the history and debates around sati in early-nineteenth-century British India, see Mani. <a href="#back24">back</a></p>
<p><a name="n25" id="n25"> </a><sup>25</sup>&#160;&#160;Buchanan incorporates this anecdote and the ones that follow in the <i>Memoir</i>, 37-8. Teignmouth, aka John Shore, had evangelical leanings and would become the Governor-General. <a href="#back25">back</a></p>
<p><a name="n26" id="n26"> </a><sup>26</sup>&#160;&#160;Marx also imagined that India's mythic consciousness led inevitably to anarchic violence: "We must not forget that this undignified, stagnatory, and vegetative life, that this passive sort of existence evoked on the other part, in contradistinction, wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction, and rendered murder itself a religious rite in Hindustan." See 18. <a href="#back26">back</a></p>
<p><a name="n27" id="n27"> </a><sup>27</sup>&#160;&#160;In 1807, Thomas Twining, one of the EIC's proprietors, argued against the introduction of missionaries to British India by insisting that Indians have only a religious, not a political, consciousness and hence will necessarily react violently to any perceived incursion upon their religion: "Sir, the people of India are not a political, but a religious people. In this respect, they differ, I fear, from the inhabitants of this country. They think as much of their Religion, as we of our Constitution. They venerate their Shastah and Koran, with as much enthusiasm as we our Magna Carta. [. . .] As long as we continue to govern India in the mild and tolerant spirit of Christianity, we may govern it with ease: but if ever the fatal day shall arrive, when religious innovation shall set her foot in that country, indignation shall spread from one end of Hindostan to the other; and the arms of fifty millions of people will drive us from that portion of the globe, with as much ease as the sand of the desert is scattered by the wind." See Marshall, 189-90. <a href="#back27">back</a></p>
<p><a name="n28" id="n28"> </a><sup>28</sup>&#160;&#160;Note that not only the Vellore mutiny, but also the Jacobite (1745) and the United Irishmen (1798) rebellions were precedents for the Hindu uprising. The uprising, then, is "overdetermined" to say the least, an extremely rich topos for Morgan that would have been immediately intelligible to the metropolitan reading public. Marilyn Butler comments: "In 1798 Ireland erupted in a widespread and bloody rebellion, headed by the United Irishmen and supported by an invading French army [. . .] . Continuing agrarian unrest, a mounting political campaign for Catholic emancipation, and bold criticism of Britain's war effort by an Irish journalist, Peter Finnerty, brought Ireland back into the headlines in 1811 [. . .] . It is partly because the question of Ireland--its persecuted religionists, its national consciousness--now began to emerge with the modern politics and ancient histories of various peoples of the Orient that Eastern imperialism henceforth figured as the topic of a new style of political poetry." See Butler, 421. <a href="#back28">back</a></p>
<p><a name="n29" id="n29"> </a><sup>29</sup>&#160;&#160;In <i>Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World</i>, Partha Chatterjee argues that even Third World nationalist thought has been unable to imagine a postcolonial state that is not managed by Western bureaucratic and scientific thought, and that this inability is its failure. <a href="#back29">back</a></p>
<p><a name="n30" id="n30"> </a><sup>30</sup>&#160;&#160;Bearce, 142-3. <a href="#back30">back</a></p>
<p><a name="n31" id="n31"> </a><sup>31</sup>&#160;&#160;"From the glimpses which the records of their private thoughts permit, they possessed what might be termed the Romantic temperament; combining a strong introspective bent, a sensibility for natural beauty and for historical associations, with an imaginative urge for release in action and adventure" (10). <a href="#back31">back</a></p>
<p><a name="n32" id="n32"> </a><sup>32</sup>&#160;&#160;David Ludden comments that "early colonialism produced two foundational ideas about traditional India: (1) India was "from time immemorial" a land of autonomous village communities in which (2) the force sustaining tradition was Hindu religion, with its complex social prescription, above all those pertaining to caste" (259). <a href="#back32">back</a></p>
<p><a name="n33" id="n33"> </a><sup>33</sup>&#160;&#160;Stein explains further: "In effect, Munro was proposing to strike at the powers and rights of any magnate by whom major decisions about the utilization of men and land were made" (58); "[Munro's] July 1794 report provides a clear idea of Munro's political principle of destroying any and all intermediary authority between the Company and the cultivator as the best assurance of the securing of control by the Company over its new dominions" (60). <a href="#back33">back</a></p>
<div align="center">
<p>Works Cited</p>
</div>
<p class="hang">Arendt, Hannah. <i>The Origins of Totalitarianism</i>. 1948. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1979.</p>
<p class="hang"><i>Asiatic Researches</i>. Vol 4. New Delhi: Cosmo Publications, 1979. 22 vols. Rpt. of <i>Asiatick Researches, or, Transactions of the society instituted in Bengal, for inquiring into the history and antiquities, the arts, sciences, and literature of Asia</i>. Calcutta: The Asiatick Society, 1791. In twenty-two volumes.</p>
<p class="hang">Bearce, George. <i>British Attitudes Toward India 1784-1858</i>. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1961.</p>
<p class="hang">Buchanan, Claudius. <i>Memoir of the Expediency of an Ecclesiastical Establishment for British India: both as the means of perpetuating the Christian religion among our own countrymen, and as a foundation for the ultimate civilization of the natives</i>. Cambridge, MA, 1811.</p>
<p class="hang">Butler, Marilyn. "Orientalism." <i>The Romantic Period</i>. Ed. David Pirie. New York: Penguin, 1994. 395-447.</p>
<p class="hang">Cain, P. J. and A. G. Hopkins. <i>British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion 1688-1914</i>. New York: Longman, 1993.</p>
<p class="hang">Campbell, Mary. <i>Lady Morgan: The Life and Times of Sydney Owenson</i>. London: Pandora, 1988.</p>
<p class="hang">Chamberlain, Kathleen Reuter. "Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan." <i>Dictionary of Literary Biography</i>. Vol. 116. Detroit: Gale Research, 1992. 216-22.</p>
<p class="hang">Chatterjee, Partha. <i>Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse?</i>. 1986. U of Minnesota P, 1993.</p>
<p class="hang">Embree, A. T. <i>Charles Grant and British Rule in India</i>. New York: Columbia UP, 1962.</p>
<p class="hang">Guha, Ranajit. <i>A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement</i>. 1963. Duke UP, 1996.</p>
<p class="hang">Hart, Carol. "Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan." <i>Dictionary of Literary Biography</i>. Vol. 158. Detroit: Gale Research, 1996. 234-48.</p>
<p class="hang">Lew, Joseph W. "Sidney Owenson and the Fate of Empire." <i>Keats-Shelley Journal</i> 39 (1990): 39-65.</p>
<p class="hang">Ludden, David. "Orientalist Empiricism: Transformations of Colonial Knowledge." <i>Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament</i>. Ed. Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1993.</p>
<p class="hang">Luk&#225;cs, Gyorgy. <i>The Historical Novel</i>. 1962. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1983.</p>
<p class="hang">Maclean, Charles. <i>A View of the Consequences of Laying open the Trade to India, to Private Ships; with some Remarks on the Nature of the East India Company&#8217;s Rights to their Territories, and the Trade depending upon them, and on the Conduct and Issue of the Late Negociation for a Renewal of their Exclusive Privileges</i>. Collected in <i>The Pamphleteer</i>. London: Printed by A.J. Valpy, 1813. 185-242.</p>
<p class="hang">Mani, Lata. "Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India." <i>Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History</i>. Eds. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1990. 88-126.</p>
<p class="hang">Marshall, P.J., ed. <i>Problems of Empire: Britain and India 1757-1813</i>. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1968.</p>
<p class="hang">Marx, Karl. <i>The First Indian War of Independence, 1857-1859</i>. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975.</p>
<p class="hang">Metcalf, Thomas. <i>Ideologies of the Raj</i>. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.</p>
<p class="hang">Morgan, Lady (Sydney). <i>The Missionary, an Indian Tale</i>. New York: Franklin Company, 1811.</p>
<p class="hang">Nussbaum, Felicty. <i>Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives</i>. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995.</p>
<p class="hang">Philips, C. H. <i>The East India Company 1784-1834</i>. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1961.</p>
<p class="hang">Smith, Adam. <i>Lectures on Jurisprudence</i>. New York: Oxford UP, 1978.</p>
<p class="hang">Stein, Burton. <i>Thomas Munro: The Origins of the Colonial State and His Vision of Empire</i>. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.</p>
<p class="hang">Stokes, Eric. <i>The English Utilitarians and India</i>. 1959. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1963.</p>
<p class="hang">Teltscher, Kate. <i>India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India 1600-1800</i>. New York: Oxford UP, 1995.</p>
<p class="hang">Trumpener, Katie. <i>Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire</i>. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997.</p>
<p class="hang">Viswanathan, Gauri. <i>Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief</i>. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998.</p>
</li>
</ol></div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-authored-by-secondary- field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Authored by (Secondary):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="role:AUT"><a href="/person/ahmed-siraj">Ahmed, Siraj</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31532">Praxis Series</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/881" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Siraj Ahmed</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/882" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Lady Sydney (Owenson) Morgan</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/883" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">_The Missionary_</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/884" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">India in literature</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/claudius-buchanan" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Claudius Buchanan</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/charles-maclean" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Charles Maclean</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/katie-trumpener" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Katie Trumpener</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/sydney-owenson" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sydney Owenson</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/sydney-owenson-morgan" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sydney (Owenson) Morgan</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/maria-lovell-edgeworth" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Maria Lovell Edgeworth</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/hannah-arendt" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Hannah Arendt</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/edmund-burke" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Edmund Burke</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/georg-luk%C3%A1%C3%A7s" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Georg Lukáçs</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-city-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">City:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/city/madras" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Madras</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/city/london" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">London</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/city/vellore" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Vellore</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/city/calcutta" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Calcutta</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-country-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Country:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/france" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">France</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/country/portugal" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Portugal</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/spain" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Spain</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/country/india" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">India</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/ireland" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Ireland</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-provinceorstate-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">ProvinceOrState:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/kashmir" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Kashmir</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/province-or-state/goa" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Goa</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-continent-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Continent:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/continent/europe" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Europe</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-discipline-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Discipline(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-discipline/literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Literature</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-type-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Type(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-type/typescript" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Typescript</a></li></ul></section>Fri, 23 Mar 2012 17:32:25 +0000rc-admin16255 at http://www.rc.umd.eduHarshbarger, "National Demons: Robert Burns, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Folk in the Forest"http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/sullenfires/harshbarger/harshbarger_essay.html
<div class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/praxis/sullenfires/index.html">Sullen Fires Across the Atlantic: Essays in Transatlantic Romanticism</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><div id="title">
<div align="center">
<h2>Sullen Fires Across the
Atlantic:<br />
Essays in Transatlantic Romanticism</h2>
</div>
<h3 align="center">National Demons: Robert Burns,<br />
Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Folk in the Forest</h3>
<h4 align="center">Scott Harshbarger, Hofstra
University</h4>
</div>
<div id="content">
<ol>
<li>
<p>As Carol McGuirk has demonstrated, Robert
Burns&rsquo; influence on nineteenth-century American
culture (literary and otherwise) was pervasive. She
goes so far as to compare Burns to Elvis, in that "mere
celebrity has been transcended and cult status
achieved" (137). This essay compares one of
Burns&rsquo; most popular poems, "Tam O&rsquo;Shanter,"
with one of Hawthorne&rsquo;s most famous stories:
"Young Goodman Brown." Hawthorne&rsquo;s interest in
Burns, the possible date of composition of "Young
Goodman Brown," and the striking similarities between
story and poem suggest direct influence. A comparison
of the two works also sheds light on the strategies the
authors developed in adapting folk materials in a
critical milieu which regarded such appropriation as
intrinsically bound up with literary nationalism. If
literary nationalism is often intended to celebrate the
native glory of an exceptional people, these works,
drawing on the content and technique of folk legend,
reveal the flipside of that project, illuminating with
a devilish light the complex relationship between
demons, demonizers, and cultural nation-making.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Although no critic to my knowledge has considered
"Tam O&rsquo;Shanter" a precursor of "Young Goodman
Brown,"<a href=
"#1">[1]</a>
there are several indications of direct influence. To
start, all four volumes of Burns&rsquo; poetry and
songs were checked out to the Hawthorne household in
November of 1828 (<em>Hawthorne&rsquo;s Reading</em>
46), the earliest conjectured year for the composition
of "Young Goodman Brown" (Newman 333). Several
similarities between the two works also suggest direct
influence. Both Goodman Brown and "Honest" Tam
O&rsquo;Shanter ignore their wives&rsquo; warnings and,
heading into the night, witness a demonic rite
performed by witches and presided over by the devil
himself. While setting and action are similar, so are
other thematic and narrative elements: journey,
isolation, initiation, and a kind of strategic
ambiguity, manifested on one level as a blurring of
dream and reality. Wavering between skepticism and
belief, the narrators of both tales leave it up to the
reader to decide what really happened to Tam or
Brown.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>There is no doubt that both authors were regularly
attracted to folk material in fashioning their
respective works. Born into a mid-eighteenth-century
rural peasant class, Burns achieved a mastery of folk
legend and song that positioned him to take advantage
of a thriving Scottish nationalism.<a href=
"#2">[2]</a>
Set in motion by the Act of Union in 1707,
Scotland&rsquo;s national yearnings, writes Marilyn
Butler, help explain "why an apparently local writer
using a provincial idiolect at once found a receptive
audience, and why the conditions were right for him to
become a <em>national</em>, that is a Scottish poet"
(103). In many ways, Burns seems an embodiment of the
developing eighteenth-century conception of The Bard,
"a figure who," writes Katie Trumpener, "represents the
resistance of vernacular oral traditions to the
historical pressures of English imperialism and whose
performances brings the voices of the past into the
sites of the present" (33).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Presented to the literate elite in December of 1786
by Henry Mackenzie with what Manning calls "an air of
patriotic duty" (162), Burns would become the rustic
darling of Scottish nationalists: "Burns&rsquo;
subsequent exertions as a song collector in his own
right sprang from a similarly motivated antiquarian and
editorial desire to preserve and restore native Scot
culture" (<em>Fragments</em> 162). Referring
specifically to the Act of Union, Burns published one
of his most angry songs in 1791, a year after composing
"Tam":</p>
<blockquote>
O would or I had seen the day<br />
That treason thus could sell us,<br />
My auld grey head had lien in clay,<br />
Wi&rsquo; Bruce and loyal Wallace!<br />
But pith and power, till my last hour,<br />
I&rsquo;ll mak this declaration;<br />
We&rsquo;re bought and sold for English gold,<br />
Such a parcel of rouges in a nation! (17 - 24)
</blockquote>
<p>Burns&rsquo; resentment of English rule would only
be exacerbated by the repressive measure taken by the
central government to stifle dissent, including the
banning of native dress as well as the deportation of
resistance leaders.<a href=
"#3">[3]</a></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Nevertheless, Burns was skeptical of the decades-old
movement which, suffering military disaster in 1745,
continued to call for armed struggle against the
English:</p>
<blockquote>
Ye Jacobites by name, give an ear, give an ear,<br />
Ye Jacobites by name, give an ear;<br />
Ye Jacobites by name<br />
Your fautes I will proclaim,<br />
Your doctrines I maun blame, you shall hear . . .
.<br />
<br />
What makes heroic strife, fam&rsquo;d afar,
fam&rsquo;d afar?<br />
What makes heroic strife fam&rsquo;d afar?<br />
What makes heroic strife?<br />
To whet th&rsquo; Assassin&rsquo;s knife,<br />
Or hunt a Parent&rsquo;s life<br />
Wi&rsquo; bluidy war? (1-5, 13-18)
</blockquote>
<p>Though clearly opposed to English rule, Burns
directs his wrath at his own countrymen: those who were
bribed into allowing Scotland to become a province of
Great Britain, as well as those who persisted in a
movement that, receiving new inspiration from the
French Revolution, encouraged violent resistance.
Although Burns would always retain his faith in the
Scottish "folk," he found himself increasingly at odds
with both the political elite and its militant
opposition. As Leth Davis and others have argued,
Burns' ambivalent nationalism found expression in much
of his poetry and songs, including "Tam
O&rsquo;Shanter."<a href=
"#4">[4]</a></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Much has been written on the longstanding connection
between Scottish and American intellectual and
political culture.<a href=
"#5">[5]</a>
Though writing decades later, Hawthorne, like Burns,
came of age in a country dominated by nationalist
ideology. Whereas Burns&rsquo; national sensibility was
conditioned by Scotland&rsquo;s political domination by
an imperial power, Hawthorne&rsquo;s was influenced by
an America that, emerging victorious from the War of
1812, set about expanding the franchise and enlarging
the country. However, democratic empowerment would be
limited to white males, and annexation of territory was
accomplished through a brutal "Indian Removal" policy.
"The metaphor of a peaceful nation which now turned its
face toward the West is historically sound," writes
George Dangerfield in <em>The Awakening of American
Nationalism: 1815-1828</em>, adding a qualifier
evocative of "Young Goodman Brown": "but only if one
concedes that this nation was constantly looking over
its shoulder" (12).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Born on the Fourth of July, Hawthorne would have
many occasions to reflect on the uncritical celebration
of the nation. Moreover, he would never forget that he
was the descendent of two imposing figures of American
history who brought the spirit of persecution to public
service, one famous for violently driving a Quaker
woman out of Salem, the other for helping to preside
over the Salem witchcraft trials. Hawthorne&rsquo;s
attitude toward the national government would perhaps
find its most direct expression in his description,
appearing at the beginning of <em>The Scarlet
Letter</em>, of the "truculent" and "unhappy" national
symbol presiding over the entrance to Salem&lsquo;s
Custom-House. Though occasioned by his political
removal as Inspector in 1848, the statement has a
vividness that suggests the boiling over of feelings
that had been simmering for quite some time: "She has
no great tenderness, even in her best of moods, and,
sooner or later,&mdash;oftener sooner than
later,&mdash;is apt to fling off her nestlings with a
scratch of her claw, a dab of her beak, or a rangling
wound from her barbed arrows" (2-3).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Hawthorne&rsquo;s suspicion of public authority was
complemented by an awareness that "the people" were
susceptible to a variety of moods and manipulations, a
fact evident in the many disturbing crowd scenes that
appear in his fiction, from "My Kinsman Major Molineux"
to <em>The Marble Faun</em>. Using Hawthorne&lsquo;s
work as prime example, Nicolaus Mills notes that "In
the midst of an era of nationalism and expansion [the
classic American novel] reflects an abiding fear that
in America democratic men are the enemy of democratic
man" (12).<a href=
"#6">[6]</a>
Given his family history and the current national
proclivities, it is perhaps not surprising that, while
his closest friends became prominent politicians,
Hawthorne himself cultivated an almost pathological
privacy.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Like eighteenth-century Scotland, early
nineteenth-century America sought to define its
national culture by turning to apparently indigenous
American folk sources. Influenced by Herder,<a href=
"#7">[7]</a>
such prominent writers as James Kirke Paulding, William
Cullen Bryant, John Neal, Rufus Choate, and Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow were among the those calling for
an original American literature (Bland 78; Doubleday
450). Delivering the oration at Hawthorne&rsquo;s
graduation from Bowdoin in 1825 , Longfellow
remarked,</p>
<blockquote>
We are thus thrown upon ourselves: and thus shall our
native hills become renowned in song, like those of
Greece and Italy. Every rock shall become a chronicle
of storied allusions: and the tomb of the Indian
prophet be as hallowed as the sepulchers of ancient
kings, or the damp vault and perpetual lamp of the
Saracen monarch. (qtd. in Bland 78).
</blockquote>
<p>Indeed, around the time Hawthorne may have composed
"Young Goodman Brown," Paulding, Bryant, and Neal
attempt to create an authentic American literature by
drawing on witch lore and legend.<a href=
"#8">[8]</a></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Although not embedded in the world of oral tradition
in the same way Burns was, Hawthorne did have a deep
and abiding interest in folklore and storytelling.
Coleman Tharpe has argued that the oral narrators who
appear in Hawthorne&rsquo;s novels, "represent a unique
refinement of Hawthorne&rsquo;s earlier artistic
experiments with the oral folk tradition, particularly
his experiments with the oral folk narrator" (205).
From his projected story collection, "The
Story-Teller," to the evocatively titled "Twice-Told
Tales," to the oral aspects of <em>The Scarlet
Letter</em>, Hawthorne consistently evinced a
fascination with folk tradition, and the power of the
spoken word in its many forms.<a href=
"#9">[9]</a>
As Lauren Berlant writes in her discussion of
Hawthorne&lsquo;s construction of a "national
symbolic," "[the] early tales can illuminate the later
national tales and novels: first, because they all
center on a scene of oral transmission that
demonstrates the tangled relations between discursive
power and &lsquo;native&rsquo;-historical knowledge"
(35).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Like "Tam O Shanter," "Young Goodman Brown" portrays
the tangled relations between the author, the folk
material he has chosen to adapt, and the literary
nationalism very much in the air. However, as Frank
Doubleday saw years ago, Hawthorne made a "significant
departure" from the program of literary nationalism
laid out by such writers as Rufus Choate:</p>
<blockquote>
[Hawthorne] will not use the past only to glorify and
idealize it. Choate&rsquo;s motives are worthy
enough; he believes that historical fiction would
foster a corporate imaginative life and reassemble
"the people of America in one fast congregation":
&lsquo;Reminded of our fathers, we should remember
that we are brethren.&rsquo; He urges a selection
from the varied materials of history to achieve
artistic unity; but he urges, too, a selection in
which all that is regrettable in Puritan society be
suppressed. (451)
</blockquote>
<p>Doubleday sees in Hawthorne&rsquo;s story "P&rsquo;s
Correspondence" the author&rsquo;s ultimate rejection
of Sir Walter Scott&rsquo;s celebratory form of
literary nationalism: "Were he still a writer," avers
the narrator of Hawthorne&rsquo;s story, "and as
brilliant a one as ever, he could no longer maintain
anything like the same position in literature. The
world, nowadays, requires a more earnest purpose, a
deeper moral, and a closer and homelier truth than he
was qualified to supply it with" (qtd. in Doubleday
453). Hearing the calls for a nationalist literature,
Hawthorne would turn from Scott and, following a course
closer to Burns&rsquo;, compose tales which reflect and
comment on the problematic and ambiguous nature of
nationalism itself.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>While some interpreters of nationalism regard it as
a product of the Enlightenment and French and American
Revolutions,<a href=
"#10">[10]</a>
and others find its roots in the Renaissance or
earlier,<a href=
"#11">[11]</a>
most acknowledge the various contradictory and
problematic strands of what would come to be one of the
most potent and vexing forces of the modern world.
While Herder and other eighteenth-century writers had
advocated the progressive aspects of a folk-based
organic nationalism, the subsequent histories of many
nationalist movements have proven to be much more
troubling. Regardless of their political motivations or
consequences, nationalist movements require narrative,
a story that endows the "nation" with some kind of
authentic native authority. Several interpreters of
nationalism have stressed the fictive aspects of such
narratives. Writes Ernest Gelner: "The cultural shreds
and patches used by nationalism are often arbitrary
historical inventions. Any old shred and patch would
have served as well" (66). However, as Anthony Smith
points out, such "shreds and patches" only serve the
nationalist story if they have emotional resonance.
Their appeal, writes Smith, "has nothing to do with
their &lsquo;innovative qualities,' let alone their
truth-content, and everything to do with the traditions
of popular ethnic myths, symbols and memories which
nationalisms habitually evoke, and invoke" (83). By
focusing on "the analogy between political Union and
personal integration" Manning also relates political to
personal identity: "In both cases, &lsquo;union&rsquo;
is about narrative&mdash;telling a single story of
nation or self&mdash;and about how the mind stabilizes
conditions of flux sufficiently to realise the
continuities on which such a story would depend"
(<em>Fragments</em> 11). Burns and Hawthorne, I would
argue, are less concerned with the literal truth of
such legends than they are with their "emotional
resonance," and the role such resonance plays in
entwining the political with personal, for good or
ill.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>In "Tam" and "Brown," Burns&rsquo; and
Hawthorne&rsquo;s explorations of the dark side of folk
nationalism begin with their protagonists&rsquo;
ignoring their wives&rsquo; prophetic warnings.
Tam&rsquo;s wife Kate "prophesied that late or soon /
Thou would be found deep drown&rsquo;d in Doon; / Or
catch&rsquo;d wi&rsquo; warlocks in the mirk, / By
Alloway&rsquo;s auld haunted kirk." (558).
"&rsquo;Dearest heart,' whispered [Faith], softly and
rather sadly, when her lips were close to his ear,
&lsquo;pr&rsquo;y thee, put off your journey until
sunrise, and sleep in your own bed tonight. A lone
woman is troubled with such dreams and such thoughts,
that she&rsquo;s afeard of herself, sometimes'" (74).
Just as women play a key role in both tales so have
they been crucial to the development of the nation
state. Foya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis identify
several ways in which "women have tended to participate
in ethnic and national processes and in relation to
state practices," in particular, as "transmitters of
culture," "biological reproducers of members of ethnic
collectivities," and "reproducers of the boundaries of
ethnic/national groups" (7). The women in both tales
represent an aspect of the social story associated with
wives&rsquo; tales, young or old, their warnings
pregnant with the events to come. Representing the
homely, the familiar, the domestic on the one hand, and
the wild and disturbing on the other, wives and witches
symbolize the boundaries both men will cross on their
wayward journeys. Writes Manning: "Goodman
Brown&rsquo;s unstable allegorizing mind is polarized;
to him his wife Faith <em>is</em> purity. He cannot
allow her (in his mind) to have any connection with
evil" (<em>Puritan-Provincial</em> 99). Faith&rsquo;s
admission "that she&rsquo;s afeard of herself,
sometimes" hints at her role in collapsing the
boundaries of Brown&rsquo;s dichotomized world at the
heart of Hawthorne&rsquo;s story.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Impelled originally by the antiquarian Francis
Grose&rsquo;s request that Burns contribute to a volume
that would record for national posterity the various
stories associated with Aloway Kirk,<a href=
"#12">[12]</a>
Burns dramatizes the profound effect of such stories by
having Tam ride by various reminders of local
legend:</p>
<blockquote>
By this time he was cross the ford. . . past the
birks and meikle stane, Whare drunken Charlie
brak&rsquo;s neck-bane; And thro&rsquo; the whines,
and by the cairn, Whare hunteres fand the
murder&rsquo;d bairn [child]; And near the thorn,
aboon the well, Whare Mungo&rsquo;s mither
hang&rsquo;d hersel.&mdash;(89-96)
</blockquote>
<p>The evocative specificity of these rural legends
helps ground the story in local and personal
associations: having come from an extended stay in the
Tavern, Tam should be especially affected by the
mention of drunken Charlie&rsquo;s legendary demise.
The fact that such legends keep alive the victims of
these rural tragedies suggests the kind of cultural
haunting that Manning equates with tradition itself:
"Tradition, like a ghost, is a mnemonic and an
admonition to the present. A kind of platonic
anamnesis, or reminiscence of former existence, it
attempts to create and sustain a communal cultural
memory in potentially hostile circumstances"
(<em>Fragments</em> 167). Local, particular, and
tragic, the incidents that Burns memorializes through
Tam&rsquo;s ride foreshadow the even darker legend to
come.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>While Burns seeks to reclaim a national tradition
posed against "the potentially hostile circumstances"
of English hegemony, Hawthorne uses the stuff of
history and legend to formulate what Lauren Berlant,
following Foucault, calls "counter memory": "the
residual material that is not identical with the
official meanings of the political public
sphere&mdash;for instance, the material of popular
memory in which public or national figures, bodies,
monuments, and texts accrue a profusion of meanings"
(6). What Mary Ellen Brown remarks of Burns and "Tam
O&rsquo;Shanter" can be applied to Hawthorne as well:
"Burns not only used legend content, he also recreated
in the poem aspects of the legend context, the
situation of legend exchange" (65). The power of such
exchange hinges on intimacy and the potential for
identification between speaker and audience. Such
intimacy and identification is underscored by the
narrator&rsquo;s observation that the figure Brown had
arranged to rendezvous with in the forest, bore "a
considerable resemblance to him, though perhaps more in
expression than features. Still, they might have been
taken for father and son" (76).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The invoking of kinship ties suggests a parodic
inversion of the ancestral genealogy underlying many
"proto-" or "primordial" nations.<a href=
"#13">[13]</a>
This figure, though "simply clad as the younger, and as
simple in manner too" but having "an indescribable air
of one who knew the world" serves as intermediary
between the common man represented by Brown and the
world of nations represented by "King William&rsquo;s
court" (76). Manning finds such "familial analogies"
essential to account for the personal and political
dynamic involved in Scottish and American nationalism:
"In both Scottish and American contexts,
England-as-parent was the prior given which made it
inevitable that separate identity would be articulated
in resistance and reaction" (<em>Fragments</em> 22). In
a post-colonial American context, such a father figure
may represent the ghostly memory of the British
monarch, or it could suggest the birth of an analogous
authoritarian system. That he is not only a father but
also a devil, intent on passing his snake-like staff
down to Brown, suggests that Hawthorne is suspicious of
any process that attempts to bind the common and the
elite in intimate community through ties of blood, real
or imaginary.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Ironically, and subversively, the intimacy the devil
wishes to establish with Brown is based on stories and
events that, while evoking Hawthorne&rsquo;s ancestral
story, suggests nationalism&rsquo;s persecuting spirit.
Some historians have attempted to understand this
dimension by contrasting a liberal "civic" nationalism
with its illiberal "ethnic" counterpart,<a href=
"#11">[11]</a>
the former characterized by "inclusive tolerance," the
latter by "conflict" and "exclusion" (Marx viii).
However, as Anthony Marx has argued, even apparently
inclusive "civic" nationalism typified by England and
America has its roots in state manipulation of
religious conflict, involving the exclusion of a
demonized other. To help explain this phenomenon, Marx
turns to the political scientist Arthur Stincombe:</p>
<blockquote>
[nationalism] is a wish to suppress internal
divisions within nation and to define people outside
the group as untrustworthy as allies and implacably
evil as enemies . . . It is on the one hand a
generous spirit of identification . . . a love of
compatriots . . . But it is on the other hand a
spirit of distrust of the potential treason of any
opposition within the group and a hatred of strangers
(qtd. in Marx 23).
</blockquote>
<p>In short, "To legitimate state rule requires
cohesion of those included as a nation, against some
other" (23). A "conceptual structure of polarities,"
characteristic of Calvinism and "the psychological
state it induces in the believer," (Manning,
<em>Puritan-Provincial</em> 7) would also encourage a
nationalism predicated on the conceptual necessity of a
damned other. In "Tam" and "Brown" Burns and Hawthorne
explore and critique this powerful narrative means of
forging group identity through demonization.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Responding to Brown&rsquo;s claim that he was first
in his family to rendezvous with the devil, this figure
observes: "I helped your grandfather, the constable,
when he lashed the Quaker woman so smartly through the
streets of Salem. And it was I that brought your father
a pitch-pine knot, kindled at my own hearth, to set
fire to an Indian village, in King Philip&rsquo;s war"
(77). Hawthorne uses legend-telling&mdash;a process
which Choate and others wished would be used to
buttress national glory&mdash;to enshrine the process
by which societies cohere around the persecution of
various others, here, Quakers and Indians. By having
the Devil avow the role he has played in the Puritan
settlement since its founding, Hawthorne is able to
foreshadow the climax of the story by hinting at the
kernel of social truth revealed through legend
telling.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Again, moving beyond the mere borrowing of folk
material, Hawthorne explores the rhetoric of legend at
the heart of nation-making, a rhetoric which is most
effective when insinuating, rather than imposing,
belief. What would become a hallmark of
Hawthorne&rsquo;s mature style&mdash;what Mathiessen
referred to as his "device of multiple choice"
(276)&mdash;can be viewed as deriving from the story
teller&rsquo;s anticipation, and manipulation, of
responses from a diverse oral audience. Brown cycles
through a number of interpretations and responses, from
naive skepticism to cynical certainty, while the
narrator invites the reader to judge the ultimate
reality of the story in any number of ways: "Had
Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest, and only
dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?" (89) This
medley of interpretation highlights the social
construction and negotiation of "truth" within the
various interpretive communities in which
legends&mdash;and nations&mdash;develop.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>His faith in the wholesomeness of the community
narrative seriously threatened by his encounters in the
forest&mdash;not only with the devil, but with Deacon
Gookin, the minister, and Brown&rsquo;s Sunday School
teacher&mdash;Brown perceives a dark mass floating
overhead. Full of "confused and doubtful voices," this
cloud becomes a symbol of legend itself, along with the
forms of belief it engenders:</p>
<blockquote>
Once, the listener fancied that he could distinguish
accents of town&rsquo;s-people of his own, men and
women, both pious and ungodly, many of whom he had
met at the communion-table, and had seen others
rioting at the tavern. The next moment, so indistinct
were the sounds, he doubted whether he had heard
aught but the murmur of the old forest, whispering
without a wind. Then came stronger swell of those
familiar tones, heard daily in the sunshine, at Salem
village, but never, until now, from a cloud of night.
(82)
</blockquote>
<p>Brown&rsquo;s perception of and participation in
this dark cloud of voices reflects the content of folk
tradition&mdash;familiar and strange, homely and
sinister&mdash;as well as the unreliable but effective
process by which it survives.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>A number of folklorists have argued that folktales
are largely the product of communal
projections.<a href="#14">[14]</a>
The same process by which an audience responds
personally to folktale helps explain Brown&rsquo;s
response to the murmuring cloud. Into this murky mass
of imagined voices Brown projects his greatest fear of
all: "There was one voice, of a young woman, uttering
lamentations, yet with an uncertain sorrow, and
entreating for some favor, which, perhaps, it would
grieve her to obtain" (82). Brown&rsquo;s fate is
sealed when his call for Faith brings "a scream,
drowned immediately in a louder murmur of voices,
fading into far-off laugher, as the dark cloud swept
away . . . . something fluttered lightly down through
the air, and caught on the branch of a tree. The young
man seized it, and beheld the pink ribbon" (82). The
aural counterpart of the "specter evidence" represented
by the pink ribbon,<a href=
"#15">[15]</a>
the dark cloud of murmuring voices is used by Hawthorne
to dramatize how conviction of utmost certainty can
arise from the nebulous murmurs of the social
imagination. More specifically, this incident
foreshadows the loss, in Brown, of his faith in
official community, and the narratives that support
it.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Hawthorne underscores the intensity of Brown&rsquo;s
growing alienation from the communal story by making
him audience to a gathering symphony of perverse
utterance&mdash;real or imagined&mdash;quite different
from the whisperings of Faith that begin the tale: From
the devil&rsquo;s laughter to the strange mumblings of
the Sunday School teacher; to the "solemn old tones" of
the minister and Deacon Gookin "talking so strangely in
the empty air"; to the voice of a young woman "uttering
lamentations, yet with an uncertain sorrow"; to
Brown&rsquo;s response, mocked by the echoing forest,
"crying&mdash;&lsquo;Faith! Faith!' as if bewildered
wretches were seeking her, all through the
wilderness"&mdash;all contribute to Brown&rsquo;s
mental and social bewilderment (81-82). Brown&rsquo;s
despairing exclamation that "there is no good on earth;
and sin is but a name" (83) is followed by his own
nihilistic laughter, which, echoing the devil&rsquo;s,
prompts nature to respond in kind: "The whole forest
was peopled with frightful sounds; the creaking of the
trees, the howling of wild beasts, and, the yell of
Indians; while, sometimes, the wind tolled like a
distant church-bell, and sometimes gave a broad roar
around the traveler, as if all Nature were laughing him
to scorn . . . ." In a perverse form of call and
response, Brown rises to nature&rsquo;s profane
challenge: "&rsquo;Ha! ha! ha!&rsquo; roared Goodman
Brown, when the wind laughed at him. &lsquo;Let us hear
which will laugh loudest!&rsquo;" (83). The forest
having become an echo chamber of his social despair,
Brown is ready for his encounter with the remaining
folk in the forest.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Perhaps the most spectacular example of powerful
legendary belief having no basis in actual fact is the
conviction, held in Scotland, England, the Continent,
and Colonial America that those dedicated to Evil meet
on a regular basis to plot and celebrate the overthrow
of all things good and holy. Writes Robin Briggs: "The
stories of the [witch&rsquo;s] sabbat represented a
fusion between the persecuting stereotypes elaborated
by clerics and judges and the various older folkloric
traditions of the peasantry" (32). She continues:</p>
<blockquote>
The idea of secret meetings where orgies take place
and evil is planned must be one of the oldest and
most basic human fantasies. Charges of nocturnal
conspiracy, black magic, child murder, orgiastic
sexuality and perverted ritual were nothing new in
Europe when they were applied to witches. . . . The
stereotype is obvious; it consisted of inverting all
the positive values of society, adding a lot of lurid
detail (often borrowed from earlier allegations),
then throwing the resulting bucket of filth over the
selected victims. (32)
</blockquote>
<p>If nationalism derives much of its power by tapping
into the same ideas and emotions associated with other
forms of worship,<a href=
"#16">[16]</a>
the Witch&rsquo;s sabbath can be viewed as a demonic
version of the national religion.<a href=
"#17">[17]</a>
It is, at once, the opposite of the ruling national
order as well as the projected, symbiotic enactment of
the other on which that order is based.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Indeed, the witchcraft persecutions have been
correlated with the rise of the nation state. Supported
by the nationalist combination of elite claims and
popular sentiment, the crime of witchcraft, as
Christina Larner has pointed out, "went on the statute
books, or became otherwise the responsibility of
secular powers, at a time when jurisdictions were
becoming more centralized and more rationalized . . .
." (205). The link between the rise of nationalism and
the witchcraft of hysteria of the sixteenth and
seventeenth century supports Anthony Marx&lsquo;s
contention that early forms of nationalism require the
identification and persecution of a reviled other.
Although British nationalism was formed primarily by
demonizing Catholics, "Sometimes, such attacks were
directed instead against &lsquo;witches,&rsquo; with
any form of heresy, non-conformity, or effect of blood
seen as inviting of intolerance and treatment as
scapegoats" (96). Through the witch persecutions, the
role of women in the nation state as definers of
national boundaries would be used to define the
categorically unacceptable.<a href=
"#18">[18]</a></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>In Scotland there would be even greater opportunity
for using "witches" as scapegoats. Writes Manning: ". .
. after the departure of James VI to the English throne
in 1603 had deprived the people of a divinely ordained
focus for their loyalties, the periodic witch hunts
became a way of reaffirming defensively the precarious
theocratic solidarity of the Scottish nation" (<em>The
Puritan-provincial Vision</em>, 21). While
Calvinism&rsquo;s polarizing tendencies referred to
earlier would encourage a nationalism predicated on the
damned and the elect, its foundational focus on
original sin would also create lingering misgivings
about any form of social organization rooted in "the
people."</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>As Katherine Briggs observes, "In Scotland we find
tales of the witches&rsquo; Sabat and more instances
than in England of the diabolic compact" (326).
Accordingly, Burns is able to provide a fully
fleshed-out account of the sabbat Tam encounters:</p>
<blockquote>
And, vow, Tam saw an unco sight!<br />
Warlocks and witches in a dance;<br />
Nae cotillion brent new frae France,<br />
But hornpipes, jigs, strathspeys, and reels,<br />
Put life and mettle in their heels . . .<br />
There sat auld Nick, in shape o&rsquo;beast;<br />
A toozie tyke, black, grim, and large,<br />
To gie them music was his charge:<br />
He screw&rsquo;d the pipes and gart them skirl,<br />
Till roof and rafter a&rsquo; did dirl&mdash;
(114-118; 120-24)
</blockquote>
<p>Employing the vernacular, Burns presents an
emphatically Scottish scene, the Devil himself
providing the appropriate folk music. In this
depiction, the Scottish instruments, music, and the
dance they inspire are put into service of a devilish
celebration, wherein the national mind projects a
parallel tradition of evil&mdash;the feared yet
necessary other&mdash;through which the imagined
community of Scotland may cohere.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>If, as Tom Nairn writes, "through nationalism the
dead are awakened" (4), the process of such awakening
often involves memorializing the hideous manner in
which such deaths were effected. The role that folk
tradition can play in such awakening is suggested by
Burns&rsquo; catalogue of gruesome details:</p>
<blockquote>
Coffins stood round, like open presses,<br />
That shaw&rsquo;d the dead in their last
dresses;<br />
And by some devilish cantraip slight<br />
Each in its cauld hand held a light.&mdash;<br />
By which heroic Tam was able<br />
To note upon the haly table,<br />
A murderer&rsquo;s banes in gibbet airns;<br />
Twa span-lang, wee, unchristen&rsquo;d bairns
[children];<br />
A thief, new-cutted frae a rape [rope],<br />
Wi&rsquo; his last gasp his gab did gape,<br />
Five tomahawks, wi&rsquo; blude red-restued;<br />
Five scymitars, wi&rsquo; murder crusted;<br />
A garter, which a babe had strangled;<br />
A knife, a father&rsquo;s throat had nabled,<br />
Whom his ain son o&rsquo; life bereft,<br />
The grey hairs yet stack to the heft&rsquo;<br />
Wi&rsquo; mair o&rsquo; horrible and
awefu&rsquo;,<br />
Which even to name wad be unlawfu&rsquo;. (125-142)
</blockquote>
<p>Illumined by the coffined dead, the scene reveals
the grisly content of many a folk tale or
song&mdash;murder, execution, infanticide,
parricide&mdash;along with the bloody implements by
which these violent acts were accomplished. Examples of
the kind of "cultural haunting" that, for Manning,
suggests the disciplinary function of tradition
(<em>Fragments</em> 167), such stories arouse and make
available a variety of shades of fear and loathing,
ready to inspire nationalist purposes not imagined by
Herder.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>It is at this point that the heroes of both tales
focus their attention on the female celebrants, or in
Brown&rsquo;s case, inductee. Here the gendered aspect
of the witchcraft hysteria comes to the fore,
supporting the theory that the rise of the nation
involves the reestablishment of patriarchy.<a href=
"#19">[19]</a>
The patriarchal demand for submissive women is
reinforced by imagining its opposite: sex with the
devil, one of the most striking legendary sabbat
practices. As Anthia and Yval-Davis point out, "Women
are controlled [by the state] not only by being
encouraged or discouraged from having children who will
become members of the various ethnic groups within the
state. They are also controlled in terms of the
&lsquo;proper&rsquo; way in which they should have
them" (314). In projecting one version of the ultimate
other, the nationalist mind imagines a form of
diabolical sexual behavior&mdash;the ultimate in female
insubordination&mdash;most threatening to the
patriarchal order.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Although sex with the devil would have to qualify as
something "Which even to name wad be unlawful"
(Grose&rsquo;s volume was intended for a respectable
middle-class audience), Burns does eroticize
Tam&rsquo;s encounter with the Sabbath witches. In
doing so he creates an ironic version of this aspect of
the witch&rsquo;s sabbath, thereby revealing his
ambivalent attitudes toward the nationalist project to
create an unredeemable other. Drawing closer, Tam
observes a particular young witch, whose short skirt
turns him from shocked witness, to voyeur, to
prospective participant:</p>
<blockquote>
There was ae winsome wench and wawlie,<br />
That night enlisted in the core . . .<br />
Her cutty sark [short shirt] , o&rsquo; Paisley
harn,<br />
That while a lassie she had worn,<br />
In longitude tho&rsquo; sorely scanty,<br />
It was her best, and she was vauntie [in high
spirits]. . .<br />
And how Tam stood, like ane bewitch&rsquo;d,<br />
And thought his very een enrich&rsquo;d;<br />
Even Satan glowr&rsquo;d, and fidg&rsquo;d fu
fain,<br />
And hotch&rsquo;d and blew wi&rsquo; might and
main:<br />
Till first ae caper, syne anither,<br />
Tam tint his reason a&rsquo; thegither,<br />
And roars out, "Weel done, Cutty-sark!!" (164-174;
183-189)
</blockquote>
<p>In a Burnsian twist on the sabbath legend, a mere
witness to the sexually charged satanic ritual becomes
a potential participant, the teasing techniques of
legend-telling becoming a kind of foreplay leading to
Tam&rsquo;s ejaculatory "Weel done!" Burns reveals his
ambivalence to the nationalist project&mdash;or its
mirror opposite&mdash;by having his hero be by turns
repelled and seduced.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Suggesting his own ambivalence toward the
nationalistic uses of a folk-inspired other, Hawthorne
also has his hero witness or imagine his own Satanic
gathering. Like Tam&rsquo;s encounter, Brown&rsquo;s is
bathed in a diabolic light: "the mass of foliage, that
had overgrown the summit of the rock, was all on fire,
blazing high into the night, and fitfully illuminating
the whole field" (86). The burning bush makes visible a
"numerous congregation," which alternately shines forth
and disappears into the shadows&mdash;the visual
equivalent of the ambiguity of legend-telling.
Hawthorne&rsquo;s sabbath is also filled with music,
although here, instead of Scottish jigs, we hear
Puritan hymns, but with a twist: "Another verse of the
hymn arose, a slow and mournful strain, such as the
pious love, but joined to words which expressed all
that our nature can conceive of sin, and darkly hinted
at far more. Unfathomable to mere mortals is the lore
of fiends" (85). Like the strains of Burns&rsquo;s
sabbath, this music provides a familiar means to a
diabolical end. Although they may not seem as spirited
as Scottish jigs, the Puritan hymns, when combined with
"words which expressed all that our nature can conceive
of sin," become a powerful "anthem" (86) composed of
the sacred and the profane. Brown&rsquo;s encounter
with the folk in the forest is analogous to
Hawthorne&rsquo;s encounters with the light and dark of
the folk imagination, a microcosm of proto-nationalist
forces created and revealed through the "lore of
fiends."</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Such heterogeneous mixing is echoed in the motley
crew that makes up Hawthorne&rsquo;s black sabbath:</p>
<blockquote>
Irreverently consorting with [the] grave, reputable,
and pious people, these elders of the church, these
chaste dames and dewy virgins, there were men of
dissolute lives and women of spotted fame, wretches
given over to all mean and filthy vice, and suspected
even of horrid crimes. It was strange to see, that
the good shrank not from the wicked, nor were the
sinners abashed by the saints (85).
</blockquote>
<p>To suggest the nature of such sins, Hawthorne
details his own catalogue of crime, reminiscent of
Burns&rsquo;: "how many a woman, eager for
widow&rsquo;s weeds, had given her husband a drink at
bed-time, and let him sleep his last sleep in her
bosom; how beardless youths have made haste to inherit
their fathers&rsquo; wealth; and how fair
damsels&mdash;blush not, sweet ones!&mdash;have dug
little graves in the garden, and bidden me, the sole
guest, to an infant&rsquo;s funeral" (287). Again, we
find a kind of "counter-nation," the symbiotic partner
of the nationalist project, fueled by "lore," to which
all are invited: "Welcome, my children . . . to the
communion of your race" (86).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Whereas Both Burns and Hawthorne used the stories of
the folk in their writing, and did not shrink from
including the grisly and the grotesque, their attitudes
toward such dark tales, revealed by the tone of their
narrators, seem significantly different. Burns&rsquo;
tale emerges toward the end of a career characterized
by multiple uses of folk tales legends, and song. That
Burns in many respects felt at home in this tradition
is reflected in the rollicking denouement of the
poem:</p>
<blockquote>
The carlin [old woman] caught her [Tam&rsquo;s horse]
by the rump,<br />
And left poor Maggie scarce a stump.<br />
Now, wha this tale o&rsquo; truth shall read,<br />
Ilk man and mother&rsquo;s son take heed:<br />
Whene&rsquo;er to drink you are inclin&rsquo;d,<br />
Or cutty-sarks run in your mind,<br />
Think, ye may buy the joys o&rsquo;er dear,<br />
Remember Tam o&rsquo; Shanter&rsquo;s mare. (117-224)
</blockquote>
<p>Tam&rsquo;s tussle with the witches can be seen as
parallel to Burns' encounters with the nationalistic
implications of folktale: anxious, exciting, and
frightening, the tradition had left its mark: and
thereby hangs, or does not hang, a tail/tale.
Nevertheless, that Burns could forswear his encounters
with the folk is as likely as that Tam could swear off
drink or cutty-sarks.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>While both authors were to contribute to
nation-making by drawing on folklore, the nature of
such folklore, and the hysteria it could inspire,
inspired Hawthorne to create his own subversive tale,
but with a difference: though Brown, like Tam, snaps
the spell with an impulsive shout&mdash;"&rsquo;Faith!
Faith!&rsquo; . . . &lsquo;Look up to Heaven, and
resist the Wicked One!&rsquo;"&mdash;his is less an
ejaculation and more a form of <em>national
interuptus</em>. With his shout, the imagined community
predicated on the exclusions of a distinct other ceases
to exist. Since this is the only community Brown seems
capable of conceiving, he becomes a "stern, a sad, a
darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate
man," so that, at the end of his life, "they carved no
hopeful verse upon his tomb-stone; for his dying hour
was gloom" (90).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Whereas Burns seems content to play with the
dichotomies upon which the Scottish nation might be
constructed&mdash;his hero comically impervious to any
attempt to define a detestable other&mdash;Hawthorne
seems much more worried by any project which might rest
on such a strategy. As mentioned, such wariness was no
doubt informed by the role played by his ancestor in
the trial and execution of dozens of people during the
Salem witchcraft hysteria as well as the dark forces of
a truculent American eagle unleashed by a gathering
Jacksonian nationalism. Hawthorne does respond to the
call to use folk culture to propel a national literary
project, but in a way that demonstrates an
understanding of that culture far beyond that possessed
by those calling for its simple exploitation. If, as
Nairn writes, "the substance of nationalism as such is
always morally, politically, humanly ambiguous" so are
the folk whose stories can be manipulated to propel
nationalist literary projects. Any writer&rsquo;s
attempt to forge national worship through folk legend
and belief is considerably complicated, and, perhaps,
subversively inspired, by the strange and mournful
tales of "folk" themselves&mdash;whether we find them
in the jolly tavern, the Scottish Kirk, or a New
England forest.</p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>
<div id="notes_content">
<h4 align="center">Notes</h4>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="1"></a>1</sup> For a
summary of conjectured sources, see Newman, 333-336. While
most of the sources Newman summarizes are literary, he also
points to oral tradition: "The witch folklore transmitted
through oral tradition is difficult to document, yet during
the course of growing up in the environs of Salem,
Hawthorne had to have been exposed to some of the local
folk beliefs" (333).</p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="2"></a>2</sup> Writes the
folklorist Mary Ellen Brown: "Burns&rsquo; focus in his
early work on local topics, his frequent use of traditional
material, his acceptance of the fluidity of texts, his
stress on audience and the oral socialization of his own
works, and his articulated views on the function of
composition&mdash;all suggest Burns&rsquo; strong and
largely intuitive ties to the traditional and particularly
oral matrix of late eighteenth-century Ayrshire" (6).</p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="3"></a>3</sup> "The
pacification of the Highlands involved deliberate attempts
to eradicate traditional forms of culture in order to root
out remaining sources of indigenous identity and national
pride" (Trumpener 29).</p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="4"></a>4</sup> See Davis
72-73.</p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="5"></a>5</sup> See, for
example, Manning: "Scotland underwent&mdash;debated,
theorized, experienced, resisted, imagined&mdash;union
before the American colonies; the literature that emerged
from this experience inevitably proved potent when the
colonists began to formulate their own responses to a
crisis in their relationship with England"
(<em>Fragments</em> 4).</p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="6"></a>6</sup> See also
Larry J. Reynolds&rsquo; account of the effect that
European history had on Hawthorne&rsquo;s attitude toward
revolutionary "mobs."</p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="7"></a>7</sup> "A
nation&rsquo;s formal literature needs to be based on the
creative accomplishments of its folk, regardless of how
crude that body of materials may seem to the sophisticated
classes of society . . . . the sense of nationality is
derived from the unsophisticated folk poetry of the people"
(Herder, qtd. in Bluestein 5).</p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="8"></a>8</sup> See Bland,
79-99.</p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="9"></a>9</sup> See
Bayer.</p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="10"></a>10</sup> "Beneath
the decline of sacred communities, languages and lineages,
a fundamental change was taking place in modes of
apprehending the world, which, more than anything else,
made it possible to &lsquo;think&rsquo; the nation"
(Andersen 22).</p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="11"></a>11</sup> See
Anthony Marx.</p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="12"></a>12</sup> In a
letter to Francis Grose (401 summer 1790) Burns recounts
three of "the many Witch Stories I have heard relating to
Aloway Kirk" (22).</p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="13"></a>13</sup> Smith
cites Walker Connor&rsquo;s view that "nations, like ethnic
groups, are phenomena of mass psychology and ultimately of
felt kinship" (72).</p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="14"></a>14</sup> See
Dundes: "Projection is one of a number of psychological
defense mechanisms which provides an unconscious screen or
arena for display of the causes of anxiety and it is for
this reason that folkloristic projections are so
indispensable" (45).</p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="15"></a>15</sup> In
"Shadows of Doubt: Specter Evidence in Hawthorne's 'Young
Goodman Brown,'" Levin shows how Brown, and perhaps the
reader, falls for the same kind of "ocular deceptions" used
to convict witches during the Salem trials.</p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="16"></a>16</sup> Smith
argues that nations can be traced to "popular participation
in large-scale cults and rituals, in the performance of
ethical and religious obligations which bind a community of
presumed ancestry into a community of faith and worship, in
the sense of community evoked by symbols and myths of
ethnic origins and election, and in shared memories of
ancestors and heroic deeds" (Smith 111).</p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="17"></a>17</sup> Manning
calls the Devil&rsquo;s oration in "Young Goodman Brown" "a
demonic inversion of Dimmesdale&rsquo;s Election Day sermon
in <em>The Scarlet Letter</em>"
(<em>Puritan-Provincial</em> 101).</p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="18"></a>18</sup> Writes
Larner: "A witch was, by definition, an abnormal person.
The execution of a witch was a demonstration of group
solidarity. It removed the provocative deviant and
redefined the boundaries of normality to secure the safety
of the virtuous community . . . . Witchcraft was more than
crime for the practitioner was an enemy and witch process
was directed against the eradication of public enemies"
(206).</p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="19"></a>19</sup> Writes
Marianne Hester: "The accusation of women was not merely a
reflection of an age-old stereotype, not merely the
by-produce of a patriarchal society; the witch-hunts were a
part of, and one example of, the ongoing mechanisms for
social control of women within a general context of social
change and the reconstruction of a patriarchal society"
(276).</p>
</div>
<div id="wc_content">
<h4 align="center">Works Cited</h4>
<p class="hang" align="left">Anderson, Benedict.
<em>Imagined Communities</em>. London: Verso, 1991.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Bayer, John G. "Narrative
Techniques and the Oral Tradition in <em>The Scarlet
Letter</em>" <em>American Literature</em> 52.2 (1980):
250-63.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Berlant, Lauren. <em>The
Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and
Everyday Life</em>. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Bland, Robert. "The Role of
Folklore in Hawthorne&rsquo;s Literary Nationalism." Diss.
U of North Carolina at Greensboro, 1976. <em>DAI</em> 37
(1976): 2868A.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Briggs, Katherine. <em>British
Folk-Tales and Legends</em>. New York: Routledge, 2002.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Briggs, Robin. <em>Witches and
Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European
Witchcraft</em>. New York: Penguin Books, 1998.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Brown, Mary Ellen. <em>Burns
and Tradition</em>. U of Illinois P, 1984.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Burns, Robert. "Letter to
Francis Grose." June 1790. <em>The Letters of Robert
Burns</em>. Ed. J. Delancey Fergusson. Oxford: Clarendon,
1931.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">---. <em>The Poems and Songs
of Robert Burns</em>. Ed. James Kinsley. 3 Vols. Oxford:
Clarendon, 1968.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Butler, Marilyn. "Burns and
Politics." <em>In Robert Burns and Cultural Authority</em>.
Ed. Robert Crawford. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1997.
86-112.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Dangerfield, George. <em>The
Awakening of American Nationalism: 1815-1828</em>. New
York: Harper and Row, 1965.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Davis, Leith. "Re-presenting
Scotia: Robert Burns and the Imagined Community of
Scotland," <em>Critical Essays on Robert Burns</em>. Ed.
Carol McGuirk. New York: G.K. Hall. 63-76.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Dundes, Alan. <em>Interpreting
Folklore</em>. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Hawthorne, Nathaniel. <em>The
Scarlet Letter. The Centenary Edition of the Works of
Nathaniel Hawthorne</em>. Eds. William Charvat, et al.
Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1962.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">---. "Young Goodman Brown."
<em>Mosses from an Old Manse. The Centenary Edition of the
Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne</em>. Eds. William Charvat, et
al. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1962.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Kesselring, Marion L.
<em>Hawthorne&rsquo;s Reading; 1828-1850; A Transcription
and Identification of Titles Recorded in Charge Books of
the Salem Athenaeum</em>. New York: New York Public
Library, 1949.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Kohn, Hans. <em>The Idea of
Nationalism</em>. New York: Macmillan, 1944.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Hester, Marianne. "Patriarchal
Reconstruction and Witch-Hunting." <em>The Witchcraft
Reader</em>. Ed. Darren Oldridge. London: Routledge, 2002.
276-88.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Larner, Christina. "The Crime
of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe." <em>The Witchcraft
Reader</em>. Ed. Darren Oldridge. London: Routledge, 2002.
205-12.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Levin, David. "Shadows of
Doubt: Specter Evidence in Hawthorne's 'Young Goodman
Brown.'" <em>American Literature</em> 34.3 (l962):
344-52.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Manning, Susan. <em>Fragments
of Union: Making Connections in Scottish and American
Writing</em>. Palgrave: New York, 2002.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">---. <em>The
Puritan-provincial Vision: Scottish and American Literature
in the Nineteenth Century</em>. Cambridge UP, 1990.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Marx, Anthony W. <em>Faith in
Nation</em>. Oxford UP, 2003.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Matthiessen. F.O. <em>The
American Renaissance</em>. New York: Oxford UP, 1941.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">McGuirk, Carol. "Haunted by
Authority: Nineteenth-century American constructions of
Robert Burns and Scotland." <em>Robert Burns and Cultural
Authority</em>. Ed. Robert Crawford. Iowa City: U of Iowa
P, 1997. 136-58.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Mills, Nicolaus. <em>The Crowd
in American Literature</em>. Louisiana State UP, 1986.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Nairn, Tom. <em>Faces of
Nationalism: Janus Revisited</em>. Londson: Verso,
1997.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Newman, Lea. "Young Goodman
Brown." <em>A Reader&rsquo;s Guide to the Short Stories of
Nathaniel Hawthorne</em>. Boston: GK Hall, 1979.
333-48.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Noble, Andrew. "Burns and
Scottish Nationalism." <em>Burns Now</em>. Ed. Kenneth
Simpson. Edinburgh: Canongate Academic, 1994. 167-92.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Reynolds, Larry J. "The
Scarlet Letter and Revolutions Abroad." <em>American
Literature</em> 57.1 (March 1985): 44-67.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Tharpe, Coleman W. "The Oral
Story Teller in Hawthorne&rsquo;s Novels." <em>Studies in
Short Fiction</em> 16 (1979): 205-14.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Trumpener, Katie. <em>Bardic
Nationalism</em>. Princeton UP, 1997.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Yuval-Davis, Nira and Floya
Anthias. Introduction. <em>Woman-Nation-State</em>. London:
MacMillan, 1989.</p>
</div></div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-authored-by-secondary- field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Authored by (Secondary):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="role:AUT"><a href="/person/harshbarger-scott">Harshbarger, Scott</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31532">Praxis Series</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/623" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">nationalism</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/641" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">narrative</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2142" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Burns</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2143" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Hawthorne</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2144" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Folk</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2145" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Folklore</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2146" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Orality</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2147" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Other</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/robert-burns" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Robert Burns</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/frank-doubleday" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Frank Doubleday</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/katie-trumpener" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Katie Trumpener</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/mary-ellen-brown" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mary Ellen Brown</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/rufus-choate" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Rufus Choate</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/william-cullen-bryant" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">William Cullen Bryant</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/carol-mcguirk" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Carol McGuirk</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-city-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">City:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/city/reading" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Reading</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-country-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Country:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/great-britain" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Great Britain</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/country/scotland" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Scotland</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-continent-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Continent:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/continent/america" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">America</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-discipline-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Discipline(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-discipline/literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Literature</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-type-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Type(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-type/typescript" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Typescript</a></li></ul></section>Thu, 18 Aug 2011 05:26:13 +0000rc-admin14864 at http://www.rc.umd.eduMediating Romantic Historical Novelshttp://www.rc.umd.edu/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html
<div class="field field-name-field-published field-type-date field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2008-08-01T00:00:00-04:00">August 2008</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><h2>Mediating Romantic Historical Novels</h2>
<h4>Mike Goode, Syracuse University</h4>
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<p>As the historicist and, more recently, global turns in the humanities have renewed critical interest in historical epistemology and the problems and politics of historiography, many scholars have looked to the field of Romantic history-writing for insight into these issues and their historicity. After all, according to much of the classic mid-twentieth-century scholarship on the emergence of the idea of history, including Georg Luk&#225;cs's <em>The Historical Novel</em> (1937), Robert Collingwood's <em>The Idea of History</em> (1946), and Friedrich Meinecke's <em>Historism</em> (1959), historicist thought itself emerged most fully formed in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Britain, as did its chief literary outlet, the historical novel. Scholars may disagree over the precise form and content of these new intellectual and cultural formations, but the most influential recent monographs on the subject tend to agree with their intellectual forebears on dating and placing those formations in Romantic Britain. In fact, according to James Chandler's <em>England in 1819</em> (1998), and Katie Trumpener's <em>Bardic Nationalism</em> (1997), today's historicist and global turns in the humanities really constitute re-turns to forms of thought already manifest, among other places, in the period's historical novels, regional novels, and national tales.<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#1">[1]</a><a name="1a"> </a></p>
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<p>This intensified scholarly interest in the Romantic historical novel has not necessarily been matched, however, by enthusiasm on the part of students for reading even the most famous instances of the genre. As anyone can attest who has ever tried teaching one of Walter Scott's Waverley Novels to a classroom of American undergraduates, you can only sustain student interest for so long by reiterating the novels' monumental significance to the literary, intellectual, and cultural histories of Britain and beyond. At the same time, it is the Romantic historical novel's significance to these histories that demands that we not abandon the enterprise of teaching the genre simply on account of its present obscurity and unpopularity among students. Through the transnational influence not just of British examples of the genre, but also of the novels of James Fenimore Cooper and Honor&#233; de Balzac among others, the Romantic historical novel was the first genuinely global novelistic genre. Doris Sommers's <em>Foundational Fictions</em> (1991) documents how, for example, nineteenth-century Latin American historical novelists borrowed from and rewrote Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, which of course themselves borrowed from and reworked the formula of Scott's Waverley Novels.<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#2">[2]</a><a name="2a" id="2a"> </a> Likewise, the authors of the essays in Murray Pittock's recent collection, <em>The Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Europe</em> (2007), chart the genre's influence in nineteenth-century Europe, particularly over national historical literatures from Spain to Slovenia.<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#3">[3]</a><a name="3a"> </a> In what follows, I outline what I take to be the major challenges of teaching Romantic historical novels, with a particular emphasis on the Waverley Novels, as well as offer practical classroom strategies to address those challenges. My emphasis on the Waverley Novels is only partially
driven by the fact that they were the most popular and paradigmatic examples of the genre for Romantic reading audiences. It also stems from two other factors: first, they are the Romantic historical novels that appear most frequently on undergraduate course syllabi, and, second, based on my own experience and the anecdotal evidence of colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic, they are extremely difficult texts to teach effectively.</p>
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<p>The most obvious pedagogical obstacle that Romantic historical novels present&#8212;really, that the historical novels of any earlier period present&#8212;is that students by and large need to be familiarized with multiple historical contexts at once. In addition to the usual work of teaching about the contexts in which a given text was written and read, historical fiction of course confronts readers with another past altogether. As Michel de Certeau reminds us in <em>The Writing of History</em> (1975), all historiography writes to and about at least two distinct times and places: historiography is literally the <em>relation</em> of one place to another through writing.<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#4">[4]</a><a name="4a"> </a> While teaching a Romantic historical novel as part of a broader course on eighteenth or nineteenth-century culture can suffice to acquaint students with the artistic and political contexts of the novel's production, it is a rare American undergraduate who opens the first page of, say, Scott's <em>Old Mortality</em> (1816) or <em>Woodstock</em> (1826) with much awareness of the histories, respectively, of the Covenanters in seventeenth-century Scotland or of the Commonwealth in 1649-53. The problem becomes still more acute in the case of teaching a novel like Mary Shelley's <em>Valperga</em> (1823), when it is not just the atypical student but also the atypical Romantic literature professor who feels adequate command of the cultural intricacies of the story's fourteenth-century Florentine setting.</p>
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<p>At the same time, this is also probably the least challenging of the pedagogical problems posed by teaching historical novels. You can acquire a handle on the historical settings of most of these novels by doing some basic outside reading. Moreover, in most cases, distilling this reading into a rudimentary sketch of the sociopolitical backdrop for a given novel's events, along with a list of names of the key factions and actors, is generally enough to make the plot of the novel intelligible to students. In my experience, such information can be conveyed satisfactorily by giving a brief lecture in the class period just before students begin reading the novel or even by directing them to a reliable website that concisely and competently summarizes the relevant history for a generalist audience. When teaching historical novels about British history, for example, I often direct students to the relevant sections of the <a href="/sites/default/files/imported/pedagogies/commons/novel/www.bbc.co.uk/history/british">BBC's history website</a>. Depending on the text at hand, students may also find the extensive resources at the <a href="/sites/default/files/imported/pedagogies/commons/novel/www.oxforddnb.com">Oxford Dictionary of National Biography</a> and <a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/industry.html">Spartacus Educational websites</a> helpful for learning about specific historical figures and groups. Should you wish to acquaint students directly with histories contemporaneous with whatever historical novel they are reading, the case is more difficult, though a growing number of online archives offer subscription access to troves of eighteenth-century British manuscripts and publications, including histories. Two of the more substantial of these archives are <a href="/sites/default/files/imported/pedagogies/commons/novel/gale.cengage.com/EighteenthCentury">Eighteenth Century Collections Online</a> and <a href="/sites/default/files/imported/pedagogies/commons/novel/www.ampltd.co.uk">Adam Matthew Publications</a>. Instructors teaching one of Scott's Scottish historical novels might also consider assigning a relevant excerpt from his <em>Tales of a Grandfather</em> (1828-30) series,
the history of Scotland that he wrote for his grandson, or his <em>Quarterly Review</em> essay on "Manners, Customs, and History of the Highlanders of Scotland" (1816). The former can be downloaded as an e-text from the <a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/www.walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk/home.html">Walter Scott Digital Archive</a>, and the latter was recently issued as an inexpensive paperback.<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#5">[5]</a><a name="5a"> </a></p>
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<p>A thornier pedagogical problem lies in the fact that every history necessarily is a history of the present. As Certeau's aforementioned definition of historiography already implies, all historical representations, and this of course includes all historical novels, are only ever capable of representing the time of their production.<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#6">[6]</a><a name="6a"> </a> The problem of getting students to understand this idea is really twofold. First, they need to understand the complex concept of <em>mediation&#8212;</em>that is, the idea not just that all representations mediate, or re-present, "reality" (which itself is nothing other than a mediated and mediating construct) but also that every representation mediates the historical state of mediation itself at the time that it is produced. Second, they need to be able to recognize the historicity of a given novel's mediation of the particular history it purports to represent. That is, they need to be able to recognize both how the history the novel relates mediates the historical archive available to the writer (how the novel's history is both a selection from and a reflection of the archive) and how the history the novel relates mediates the cultural contexts in and for which it was written (how the novel produces a history of a particular past from and for the contemporary historical situation in which it is producing that history).<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#7">[7]</a><a name="7a"> </a> To put the problem in more concrete terms, while it may be easy enough to give a brief introductory lecture on the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 that will help your students understand the plot of Harrison Ainsworth's <em>Guy Fawkes</em> (1841), it is much harder to get them to see how <em>Guy Fawkes</em>'s account of the Gunpowder Plot selects from and reflects the historical archive that Ainsworth had available to him in 1841, and, furthermore, how the novel's history of Britain
in 1605 is written from and for&#8212;indeed, is inescapably <em>about&#8212;</em>Britain in 1841.</p>
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<p>Only slightly less thorny is the problem of genre, or the question of what "counts" as Romantic historical fiction and of what relation Romantic historical fiction bears to the broader intellectual field of history per se at the turn of the nineteenth century. If, following the lead of contemporary literary historians and of early-nineteenth-century novelists and reviewers, you suggest to your students that the historical novel emerged as a genre in the Romantic period, then of course you necessarily raise the question of what "historical" means for the purposes of this generic classification. Particularly if you are teaching Romantic historical novels in the context of a broader course on the history of the novel, your students will want to know on what grounds earlier novels set in the past, such as Daniel Defoe's <em>A Journal of the Plague Year</em> (1722), Horace Walpole's <em>Castle of Otranto</em> (1765), and Ann Radcliffe's <em>The Italian</em> (1796), should not be, or at least traditionally have not been, considered historical novels. Many undergraduates will balk at the claim that not every fiction set in the past constitutes a historical fiction, citing some combination of common sense, poststructuralist theory, and a multiculturalist commitment to relativism as their justification. But insofar as you do call attention to the fact that the period's reviewers and contemporary critics alike often refer to these novels as instances of a new "historical" genre of literature&#8212;as texts that are somehow historical in ways that differ from their novelistic predecessors&#8212;then you will need a way to help your students recognize the historicity of the forms of historical thought and representation that Romantic historical novels manifest. More specifically, you will need to be able to demonstrate how historical epistemology was being altered in the period, as well as how Romantic historical novels' formal properties and broader historical vision
reflected and perhaps helped enact that alteration.</p>
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<p>There are ways to overcome these pedagogical obstacles short of giving students a crash course in historicism.<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#8">[8]</a><a name="8a"> </a> Whenever I teach Romantic historical novels, I try to collapse the obstacles into one another as much as possible. Following Chandler's important account of romantic historicist epistemology in <em>England in 1819</em>, I see the task of helping students understand the complex historicist idea of mediation as simultaneously giving them a purchase on one of the key concepts through which, as Nancy Armstrong would put it, Romantic historical novels "think" about the problems and politics of historical epistemology and representation.<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#9">[9]</a><a name="9a"> </a> In other words, I take the understanding of mediation that underpins most historicist analysis of literature today to be not only one of the things that these old novels can teach our students but also one of the hallmarks of the novels' claims to being historical in ways that differ from their novelistic predecessors. Certainly there are easier paths into teaching the genre. You might simply ask your students, for example, to try to diagnose what attitudes a particular Romantic historical novel generates towards whatever cultural shift or political event it portrays, or to determine what its form might imply about its vision of the homogeneity or heterogeneity of national identity, or to think about how it codes national identity in terms of gender, class, sex, and race. But I would contend that the pedagogical approach I am advocating here has the potential to enrich these and many other lines of inquiry. For how we answer such questions undoubtedly should depend in part on how we understand various Romantic historical novels to be conceiving and navigating the problems of knowing and representing the past per se, and this in turn depends on how we understand their generic
position in relation to other novels and other varieties of historiography.</p>
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<p>Of course it is one thing to want to produce this kind of understanding in students and another thing actually to achieve that result efficiently and effectively. Certainly the difficulties of the task are also going to vary depending on whether you happen to be teaching a particular historical novel in the context of a course conceived along historically synchronic lines, such as a survey of the Romantic period or the Romantic novel, or in a course organized along more diachronic lines, such as a seminar on the historical novel, the history of the novel, the history of the book, the history of history, the history of reading, or some altogether different kind of history. Regardless of the course, however, giving students some kind of historical background even before they begin reading the novel you have assigned can do more than just orient them to the setting for the novel's events. You can use it as an occasion to remind them that this historical setting, however unfamiliar now, would already have been familiar in most instances to the novel's earliest readers before they opened the book. In the case of Scott's <em>Waverley</em> (1814), I always alert my students immediately to the novel's subtitle, "'Tis Sixty Years Since," in order to convey to them that the events it chronicles were no more chronologically distant from its first audiences than World War II is from us today. In fact, given the discussion in <em>Waverley</em>'s final chapter of how the speed of cultural changes over time contributes to a sense of historical distance from the past, the setting of <em>Waverley</em> may well have felt more historically proximate to many of its first readers than WWII now feels to many of us. Scott may be right when he notes in <em>Waverley</em>'s final chapter that over the last sixty years of the eighteenth century Scotland went through an accelerated series of changes that it had taken England the preceding quarter millennium to undergo. But the extent and
rapidity of those changes pale by comparison to the swift economic and geopolitical transformation of much of the world in the sixty years since the end of WWII.</p>
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<p>The WWII comparison can also prove helpful for introducing the concept of mediation even before students have begun reading the novel. In my experience, most undergraduates have seen one or more of the last decade's big-budget WWII films, such as <em>Saving Private Ryan</em>, <em>The Thin Red Line</em>, <em>Pearl Harbor</em>, <em>Flags of Our Fathers</em> or <em>Letters from Iwo Jima.</em> More importantly, these students usually are familiar enough with the war from sources besides the films (museum displays, history courses in high school or college, relatives' stories, History Channel documentaries, Ken Burns's <em>The War)</em> that they are prepared to discuss these films as mediations. I ask my students what kinds of overarching stories as a culture we tend to tell ourselves about the historical significance of WWII and then try to get them to describe for their classmates how they see any of these films as participating in or revising these stories. Then I ask them why, as a culture, we might have been telling ourselves these kinds of stories about the war and why we are not telling them or are telling them differently now: how and to whom might these stories have been comforting? What has happened in recent years that might have lead us to revisit and revise some of these stories? How do these films about the past clearly gesture at the same time to present events or values? What details or kinds of events in recent WWII films prove the most impossible to incorporate into the older stories? What kinds of details and events do these films tend not to depict?<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#10">[10]</a><a name="10a"> </a></p>
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<p>At the very least, by asking these kinds of questions, you draw your students' attention to the way that a historical fiction&#8212;or, really, any historical representation&#8212;reflects, selects from, and even invents or calls into existence the archive. But more importantly, you also prompt them to think about ways that the stories we tell ourselves about history are really always already stories that we are telling about ourselves&#8212;that every historical representation inescapably represents and comments on the culture that produced it, that every historical representation captures a present-tense relationship to the past rather than the past itself. After holding these discussions, you can then remind students that <em>Waverley</em>'s early audiences would have had the ability to have similar discussions about the novel's portrayal of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion (indeed, according to the evidence of early reviews, they <em>did</em> have those discussions). Thus, even before beginning the novel, students will recognize that a crucial, but also difficult, task facing them will be to figure out how the novel is not really about 1745 but about the relationship Britain in the 1810s had to 1745&#8212;how the novel is as much a mediation of Britain in the 1810s as it is of the events of 1745.</p>
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<p>Having already raised the idea of mediation before students open whatever historical novel it is that I have assigned, I proceed to use the first class discussion to raise the issue of the genre's specificity within the field of Romantic letters. A fledgling genre in the period, historical novels tend to demarcate their authority within the broader fields of the novel and of history-writing to the point that it can be instructive to think about how the histories they tell constitute mediations at least in part of the state of mediation itself in the period. You can pave the way for such metageneric thinking by having students examine various Romantic texts that map the generic fields of the novel and of history-writing. I find Regency caricatures of novel readers to be an accessible starting point for this project, particularly James Gillray's <em>Tales of Wonder!</em> (1802), which lampoons four emotionally overwrought women reading a Gothic novel aloud by candlelight, and George Cruikshank's <em>Four Specimens of the Reading Public</em> (1826), which satirically stereotypes readers of historical novels, radical political pamphlets, erotic memoirs, and feminine romances.<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#11">[11]</a><a name="11a"> </a> These visual texts not only give students a sense of the array of options open to the period's readers but also show them evidence of how the historical novel altered the generic field of the novel, not least of all by regendering the novel's cultural authority. For, unlike the other readers in the two images, Cruikshank's stereotypical Waverley Novel reader is an educated, modish gentleman.</p>
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<p>In this respect, Cruikshank's caricature also makes a nice pairing with Jane Austen's defense of novels in Volume I, Chapter 5, of <em>Northanger Abbey</em> (1816), which profiles the array of reading options facing the Romantic reading public and the kinds of gendered cultural authority invested in different literary genres; with Austen's letter to Anna Austen Lefroy of September 28, 1814, in which she professes her wish that Scott had stuck to poetry and not begun writing novels, "especially good ones," on account of the fact that he will end up "taking the bread out of the mouths of other people";<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#12">[12]</a><a name="12a" id="12a"> </a> with the "Introductory" chapter of <em>Waverley</em>, in which Scott defines his novel's genre by way of negation, describing all of the familiar Romantic novelistic genres that it does not fit; and with Maria Edgeworth's October 23, 1814 letter to Scott, in which she implicitly registers some sense of her fellow novelist's generic innovation by criticizing him for those moments when <em>Waverley</em> "stoop[s] to imitation."<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#13">[13]</a><a name="13a" id="13a"> </a> Should you wish to supplement this discussion with an accessible scholarly account of the historical novel's masculinization of novels' cultural authority, you might also assign a few of the opening chapters of Ina Ferris's <em>The Achievement of Literary Authority</em> (1991), which establishes this point by analyzing numerous review essays from the period.<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#14">[14]</a><a name="14a" id="14a"> </a> Another good way to offer students a quick snapshot of the broader gendered generic field of the novel in the year of <em>Waverley</em>'s publication is to use the Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research's "<a href="/sites/default/files/imported/pedagogies/commons/novel/www.british-fiction.cf.ac.uk">British Fiction, 1800-1829</a>" online database to generate a list of titles of all of
the novels published in Britain in 1814.</p>
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<p>Regardless of which historical novel you are teaching, the first chapter of <em>Waverley</em> can do double-duty for you insofar as it also serves as evidence of how Romantic writers tried to invest the historical novel with authority in relation to other genres of history-writing. You can ask your students to dissect, for example, how Scott's negation of his novel's membership in other novelistic genres that employ historical settings also negates those genres' claims to historical authority. Even better suited to the purpose of elucidating how the historical novel's authority gets positioned in relation to other kinds of history-writing in the period, however, are texts that take up that relationship explicitly. Thomas Macaulay's 1828 "History" essay from the <em>Edinburgh Review</em>, for example, praises the Waverley Novels for melding social history with the political history that tended to be historians' primary focus.<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#15">[15]</a><a name="15a" id="15a"> </a> Assigning Macaulay's essay, which explicitly characterizes social history as the domain formerly of antiquaries, gives students a sense of the field of Romantic historiography as divided between antiquarian treatises and histories proper, with the historical novel bridging the two genres. It thus can be paired usefully with Chapters 3-4 of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's <em>The Last Days of Pompeii</em> (1834), which keep breaking the forward momentum of the plot in order to offer lengthy antiquarian treatises on various details of first-century Roman material culture (while at the same time making nasty remarks about antiquaries), and with Scott's famous "Dedicatory Epistle" to <em>Ivanhoe</em> (1819), which takes the form of a letter from a fictitious historical novelist to a fictitious antiquary defending the historical authority of <em>Ivanhoe.</em> You can ask students to discuss ways that the Dedicatory Epistle at once aligns historical novel-writing with and
against antiquarian research. On the one hand, the text celebrates antiquaries' emphasis on studying physical artifacts, for it talks about historical novel-reading as a form of physical travel and about historical novel-writing as the act of embodying and reviving the past.<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#16">[16]</a><a name="16a" id="16a"> </a> On the other hand, the Dedicatory Epistle's repeated punning jabs at "grave" and "dryasdust" antiquaries underscores the threat that a form of historical representation so invested in the materiality of the past potentially poses to living actively in the present.<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#17">[17]</a><a name="17a" id="17a"> </a> Having students identify how the Dedicatory Epistle's map of the field of history-writing raises the issue of what investments history-writing ought to produce in the present paves the way for discussions in subsequent classes of the politics of whatever Romantic historical novel you have assigned&#8212;whether it generates acceptance of the course of history, nostalgia for a particular lost past, or an impulse to counter-nationalist recovery or violence. Should you wish to supplement class discussion with secondary critical reading on the generic relationship between the Romantic novel and history-writing in the period, you might also assign Chapter 4 of Mark Salber Phillips's <em>Society and Sentiment</em> (2000).<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#18">[18]</a><a name="18a" id="18a"> </a> Should you wish to complicate the question of genres of history-writing still further, you might also have them read William Godwin's essay "Of History and Romance" (1797), which also gets discussed in the Phillips chapter. Godwin's essay makes the case that a romance (a term that Godwin uses interchangeably with novel) can tell a truer history than an actual history on the grounds that romance-writers do not have to speculate about the psyche and motives of their
characters in the way that historians do.<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#19">[19]</a><a name="19a" id="19a"> </a></p>
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<p>Another reason to begin teaching Romantic historical novels with discussions of the novels' general positioning within the broader field of history-writing of the period is that they are often as much about contests over modes and genres of historical representation as they are about past political and cultural upheavals. Occasionally this metahistorical contestation over the field of the "historical" is the subject of the novel, such as in Scott's <em>The Antiquary</em> (1816). But the contestation surfaces more frequently in the novel's form, as is the case, for example, in Maria Edgeworth's <em>Castle Rackrent</em> (1800) and James Hogg's <em>Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner</em> (1824). Early on in a discussion of Edgeworth's novel, which tells the story of multiple generations of an Anglo-Irish family on their financially beleaguered estate, you can have students discuss the comparative authority of the kinds of history being offered by Thady Quirk, the novel's uneducated Irish narrator, and the nameless, educated Anglo-Irish editor who has appended condescending footnotes and a glossary to Thady's narrative. I often ask students to come to class ready to talk in as specific terms as possible about how a single footnote or glossary entry of their choice has the effect of dislocating historical authority from both Thady and the editor. On the other hand, if teaching Hogg's fascinatingly schizophrenic novel, then your task will be more to get students to see how its two separate narratives of overlapping events are not just "both sides of the story" (American undergraduates' favorite chestnut for talking about competing representations of a historical conflict) but something more like incompatible metaphysical worlds. To get them to see this, I generally have students list inconsistencies between the two narratives that cannot be made compatible with one another without first rejecting the operative assumptions governing what is possible
within the worldview implied by one of the two narratives.</p>
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<p>Clarifying the novel form's relation to historical authority is still more complex, I think, when teaching a Waverley Novel. Here, the form of the Waverley Novel itself arguably constitutes the progressive teleological end of whatever contests over historical authority and modes of mediating history the novel depicts. Scott tends to portray the development of his protagonists' historical understanding as a process whereby the protagonists successively try on different narrative genres to make sense of the historical situations in which they find themselves. The hero of a Waverley Novel thus undergoes a literary education as much as a historical one, and the historical novel itself is the endpoint of both of these educations. Among all of the Waverley Novels, <em>Rob Roy</em> (1816) makes this dynamic the most explicit insofar as it presents itself as a memoir penned by the protagonist in maturity, after he has left behind his adolescent reading habits and after he has developed an historical awareness that he lacks throughout the youthful escapades that make up the bulk of the narrative. Getting students to see this point about <em>Rob Roy</em> and about other Scott novels can be difficult, however, insofar as most students will be unfamiliar with some of the literary genres a Scott protagonist reads or, what is more, with the conventions that identify one of the protagonist's hermeneutic failures as the function of the predominance of a particular narrative genre over his historical imagination. When reading <em>Redgauntlet</em> (1824), for example, students can easily pick up on the fact that Darsie Latimer's first impressions of the Laird of Redgauntlet derive in part from his reading of romances since Darsie himself admits as much as he conveys those impressions. But when reading Rob Roy, they likely will not realize that when Frank Osbaldistone falsely suspects his Jesuit cousin Rashleigh of trying to seduce a female pupil, he is emplotting his cousin's
actions within the conventions both of anti-Catholic seduction novels and, anachronistically, of late-eighteenth-century Gothic romances. To the extent that so many of these moments of epistemological failure by Scott's heroes involve mistaking one kind of historical type or character for another (in Frank's case, assuming that Rashleigh's motives are sexual rather than political), I find it useful once again to employ satirical caricatures from the period to help students see the generic conventionality of such epistemological failures. In the case of Francis's misreading of Rashleigh, any one of the hundreds of eighteenth-century images depicting lecherous Jesuits will suffice to achieve your purpose. I often select a few images from Peter Wagner's essay "Anticatholic Erotica in Eighteenth-Century England" (1991).<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#20">[20]</a><a name="20a" id="20a"> </a></p>
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<p>Having gotten students to attend to the failures of a given Waverley Novel protagonist's narrative imagination to represent the plots unfolding around him, I then try to get them to see how the novel organizes its reader's own grasp of history less according to a plot taken from other genres of fiction than to one derived from Scottish Enlightenment history and sociology&#8212;namely, the stadialist model of civilization and economic development put forth by Adam Ferguson in <em>An Essay on the History of Civil Society</em> (1767), John Millar in <em>The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks</em> (1771), and Lord Kames in <em>Sketches of the History of Man</em> (1774). Without going into the intricacies of these thinkers' progressive model of the four stages of civilization, you can still get students to recognize how a Scott novel arranges its plot as a movement through different states of society simply by having them compare a few of the passages describing the different locations the hero visits in the novel. In the case of <em>Waverley,</em> for example, close-reading the descriptions of the scene of his uncle's northern English manor (Chapter 2), the Baron of Bradwardine's house and surrounding village (Chapters 8-9), the hideout of the robber Donald Bean Lean (Chapter 17), and the Highland seat of the MacIvor clan (Chapters 19-20), will inevitably spark the recognition that the novel codes these different spaces as if each belongs to a different moment in the history of civilization. Moreover, once your students realize this, it is easy then to get them to see how the novel in effect represents the wanderings of its protagonist further away from England and from metropoles as a kind of time travel. I always draw my students a map of where these different locations lie in relation to one another in order to help them see this. Having done so, you can then ask them to start thinking about what this stadialist model reveals about how the novel might be trying
to get its readers to relate to the course of history. Is it justifying the destruction of Highland clan culture by portraying that culture as underdeveloped in relation to the state of British culture more broadly construed? Does the stadialist model of human civilization imply simply that this destruction is inevitable even if potentially lamentable? More complexly, how does overlaying the personal development of the novel's protagonist on top of his movements across these states of civilization affect our understanding of the terms of the novel's participation in that stadialist model? And how does the ending of a Waverley Novel, with the fruition of a cross-cultural marriage plot between the protagonist and some member of the "uncivilized" culture, affect readers' understanding of the novel's historical philosophy and vision of national identity?</p>
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<p>Having already spent so much time discussing the Waverley Novel hero's historical education as a process of finding the right genre through which to mediate the world around him, you have given your students the tools to produce some fairly sophisticated answers to these questions. You might encourage them to think about what generic forms characters other than the protagonist use in these different stages of civilization to mediate the world around them: in <em>Waverley,</em> for example, there are Davie Gellatley's ballads (Chapter 9), the Baron of Bradwardine's antiquarian studies (Chapters 10-11), the Highland bard's Gaelic oral poetry (Chapter 20), and Flora MacIvor's theatrical translation of the bard's Gaelic oral poetry (Chapter 22), just to name a few. On some level, the novel seems to suggest that genuine historical understanding lies in the ability to gauge not just how successfully a particular genre mediates the situation it is brought in to make sense of, but also, at the same time, whether that genre is the best one available to the particular character employing it at the time and place s/he is employing it. In other words, the novel encourages us to see Waverley's romance-derived imagination as irresponsible in relation to his situation because the state of mediation in the world in which he is brought up renders that imagination an archaism; conversely, the Highland bard's bellicose historical poetry is not anachronistic within the context of the "uncivilized" Highlands cultural context in which it is recited.</p>
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<p>Getting students to see this point reveals how Scott tries to set up the historical novel as training both a metageneric and metahistorical imagination&#8212;how, to put it in the terms I was using earlier, Scott sets up the problem of historical understanding and representation both as problems of mediation. By the time that the class arrives at the end of the novel and encounters a description of a multiply mediated painting of Waverley's Highland campaign (Chapter 71), they should thus be more than ready to discuss the ways that the novel both aligns itself with and tries to stand in opposition the painting's own kind of historical mediation. Should you wish to add extra fuel to this conversation, you might assign Hugh Trevor-Roper's provocative "The Invention of Tradition: the Highland Tradition of Scotland" essay from Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger's <em>The Invention of Tradition</em> (1983) as secondary reading.<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#21">[21]</a><a name="21a" id="21a"> </a> The essay examines the invention of the popular imagination of Highland clan culture, including the implication of the Waverley Novels in that creative (and ultimately economically driven) process.</p>
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<p>Of course not all Romantic historical novels share the Waverley Novel's stadialist model of history. But in order to get your class to think about the historical visions that inform these non-stadialist fictions, you can still use the same approach of asking your students to compare a given novel's descriptions of different cultural locations and, if possible, to track changes that occur within a single location in the novel. When teaching Edgeworth's <em>Castle Rackrent,</em> for example, you can ask students to think about what kinds of historical progressions, if any, seem to be implied by the changes from generation to generation in the Anglo-Irish family who occupy and ultimately end up selling their estate. Does each successive head of household seem to represent a historically specific character type or a more ahistorical one? What evidence, if any, does the novel provide that the story of an aristocratic Anglo-Irish family's supplanting by its Irish servant's own son, a savvy lawyer and land speculator, might be historically representative in some way? Does the novel suggest that this supplanting was inevitable? Does it suggest that this outcome is good or just? How does the presence of competing narrative voices&#8212;Irish narrator and Anglo-Irish editor&#8212;influence how we answer these questions? Such lines of inquiry of course get more complicated in the case of some of Edgeworth's other historical fictions, such as <em>Ormond</em> (1817), because, unlike <em>Castle Rackrent</em> and more akin to a Waverley Novel, they involve changes across more than one cultural locale. Nevertheless, the relation of those changes to one another is not organized in the manner of a Waverley Novel, where, according to Luk&#225;cs's influential argument in <em>The Historical Novel,</em> the protagonist's movements between and away from different cultural locales stand in for the course of history itself. I find that it can still be helpful to summarize (or to have
students read) Luk&#225;cs's argument about the function of Scott's itinerant "mediocre heroes" when they come to the end of a Romantic historical novel that does not fit the Waverley Novel formula.<a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#22">[22]</a><a name="22a" id="22a"> </a> Having that argument in place can help bring into focus the ways that a wandering hero like <em>Ormond</em>'s Harry Ormond does not necessarily stand in for the course of history. This in turn raises the question of what in the novel, if anything, does deliver a sense of history's course or, for that matter, whether the metaphor of history as something that has a "course" (a metaphor that implies a kind of organic continuity) is even appropriate to the novel's particular historical vision.</p>
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<p>Upon reaching the end of a Romantic historical novel, you can take the occasion to remind your students of their initial discussion of WWII films and suggest that it might be worthwhile to reflect on the significance of what gets left out of whatever history is represented in the novel they have just finished. It will likely be up to you to point out the existence of these omissions, such as the fact that <em>Waverley</em> essentially contains almost no references to the Battle of Culloden, the bloody and decisive defeat of the Jacobite army in 1745 that effectively ended their cause forever. In pointing out such omissions, you can ask how representing the omitted event (or individual or group or locale) might potentially have complicated or run counter to whatever vision of history the novel you are discussing seems to produce. For example, it would be much harder to interpret <em>Waverley</em> as a novel that tries to lay to rest ongoing Jacobite resentment or that portrays the course of history as a kind of dialectical moderation of competing political interests (two standard readings of the novel) had it represented a bloody, one-sided battle like Culloden. Representing the battle could not help but have underscored the ultimate dependence of Hanoverian rule's endurance in the eighteenth century&#8212;the "course" of <em>Waverley</em>'s particular history&#8212;on violence and cultural destruction.</p>
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<p>Finally, you might also use the moment of closure in discussing a Romantic historical novel to have students step back from the novel and reflect on the historical vision or narrative implied by the design of the course itself. How do Romantic historical novels fit into that vision? How does the course position Romantic historical novels in relation to the broader fields of Romantic literature and culture? How does the course relate Romantic historical novels to the novels, historical novels, historiography, and/or intellectual developments of other periods? One of the challenges that teaching Romantic novels in general poses is that the generic field of the novel in the period is so heterogeneous that teaching these texts cannot help but undermine any clear sense of the period's periodicity. One of the benefits of teaching Romantic historical novels as part of the generic field of the Romantic novel, however, is that, as a genre, they can help train students to reflect on the politics of what it means to think of culture as a heterogeneous field. As we continue to integrate Romantic novels into Romantic studies more generally, it remains to be seen, I think, whether it makes more sense&#8212;historically, theoretically, and pedagogically&#8212;to think of the heterogeneity of the fields of the Romantic novel and of Romantic literature according to the Waverley Novels' Scottish Enlightenment-derived model of uneven development, Edgeworth's novels' Raymond Williams-like model of emergent and residual cultures, Hogg's <em>Confessions</em>' more jarring vision of culture as a violent and arbitrarily dynamic heterotopia, or some altogether different model culled from a forgotten corner of the British Library or the Corvey Collection. Perhaps one of our students some day can help us figure this out.</p>
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</ol>
<hr height="1" noshade="noshade"/>
<h4><strong>Works Cited</strong></h4>
<p class="wc">Ainsworth, William Harrison. <em>Guy Fawkes, or The Gunpowder Treason.</em> London, 1841.</p>
<p class="wc">Armstrong, Nancy. <em>How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism, 1719-1900.</em> New York: Columbia UP, 2005.</p>
<p class="wc">Austen, Jane. letter to Anna Austen Lefroy, 28 September 28 1814. The Republic of Pemberley. 19 March 2007. <a href="http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/brablt16.html#letter88">www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/brablt16.html#letter88.</a></p>
<p class="wc">---. <em>Northanger Abbey: and Persuasion.</em> London, 1818.</p>
<p class="wc">Bulwer-Lytton, Edward. <em>The Last Days of Pompeii.</em> London , 1834.</p>
<p class="wc">Certeau, Michel de. <em>The Writing of History</em> (1975). Trans. Tom Conley. New York: Columbia UP, 1988.</p>
<p class="wc">Chandler, James. <em>England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism.</em> Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998.</p>
<p class="wc">Collingwood, R. G. <em>The Idea of History.</em> Ed. Jan van der Dussen. Rev. edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946.</p>
<p class="wc">Defoe, Daniel. <em>A Journal of the Plague Year.</em> London, 1722.</p>
<p class="wc">Edgeworth, Maria. <em>Castle Rackrent, An Hibernian Tale.</em> London, 1800.</p>
<p class="wc">---. <em>Harrington, A Tale; and Ormond, A Tale. In Three Volumes.</em> London, 1817.</p>
<p class="wc">Ferguson, Adam. <em>An Essay on the History of Civil Society.</em> Edinburgh, 1767.</p>
<p class="wc">Ferris, Ina. <em>The Achievement of Literary: Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels.</em> Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991.</p>
<p class="wc">Gillray, James. <em>Tales of Wonder!</em> London, 1 February 1802.</p>
<p class="wc">Godwin, William. "Of History and Romance" (1797). in <em>Caleb Williams,</em> ed. Maurice Hindle. New York: Penguin, 2005. 359-73.</p>
<p class="wc">Hamilton, Paul. <em>Historicism.</em> 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2003.</p>
<p class="wc">Hayden, John O. <em>Scott: The Critical Heritage.</em> London: Routledge, 1970.</p>
<p class="wc">Hogg, James. <em>The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.</em> London, 1824.</p>
<p class="wc">Home, Henry (Lord Kames). <em>Sketches of the History of Man.</em> Edinburgh, 1774.</p>
<p class="wc">Luk&#225;cs, Georg. <em>The Historical Novel</em> (1937). Trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell. Lincoln: U Nebraska Press, 1983.</p>
<p class="wc">Macaulay, Thomas Babington. "History." <em>Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal</em> 47 (1828): 331-51.</p>
<p class="wc">Meinecke, Friedrich. <em>Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook</em> (1959). trans. J.E. Anderson. London: Routledge &amp; Kegan Paul, 1972.</p>
<p class="wc">Millar, John. <em>The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks.</em> Edinburgh, 1771.</p>
<p class="wc">Phillips, Mark Salber. <em>Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740-1820.</em> Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000.</p>
<p class="wc">Pittock, Murray. ed. <em>The Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Europe.</em> London: Continuum, 2007.</p>
<p class="wc">Radcliffe, Ann. <em>The Italian.</em> London, 1796.</p>
<p class="wc">Robertson, Fiona. "Novels." <em>An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age.</em> Ed. Iain McCalman. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. 286-95.</p>
<p class="wc">Scott, Walter. <em>The Antiquary.</em> Edinburgh, 1816.</p>
<p class="wc">---. <em>Ivanhoe; A Romance.</em> Edinburgh, 1819.</p>
<p class="wc">---. <em>Old Mortality.</em> Edinburgh, 1816.</p>
<p class="wc">---. <em>Redgauntlet. A Tale of the Eighteenth Century.</em> Edinburgh, 1824.</p>
<p class="wc">---. <em>Rob Roy.</em> Edinburgh, 1818.</p>
<p class="wc">---. <em>Waverley.</em> Edinburgh, 1814.</p>
<p class="wc">---. <em>Woodstock; or, The Cavalier. A Tale of the Year Sixteen Hundred and Fifty-One.</em> Edinburgh, 1826.</p>
<p class="wc">Shelley, Mary. <em>Valperga: Or, The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca</em> (London, 1823).</p>
<p class="wc">Sommers, Doris. <em>Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America.</em> Berkeley: U California Press, 1991.</p>
<p class="wc">Trevor-Roper, Hugh. "The Invention of Tradition: the Highland Tradition of Scotland." In <em>The Invention of Tradition.</em> Ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983. 15-42.</p>
<p class="wc">Trumpener, Katie. <em>Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire.</em> Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998.</p>
<p class="wc">Wagner, Peter. "Anticatholic Erotica in Eighteenth-Century England." in <em>Erotica and the Enlightenment.</em> Ed. Peter Wagner. New York: Peter Lang, 1991. 166-209.</p>
<p class="wc">Walpole, Horace. <em>Castle of Otranto.</em> London, 1765.</p>
<p class="wc">Williams, Raymond. <em>Marxism and Literature.</em> Rev. edn. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1978.</p>
<hr height="1" noshade="noshade"/>
<h4><strong>Notes</strong></h4>
<p><span class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#1a">[1]</a><a name="1"> </a>James Chandler, <em>England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism</em> (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), Part I, and Katie Trumpener, <em>Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire</em> (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998), Introduction, passim.</span></p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#2a">[2]</a><a name="2"> </a>Doris Sommers. <em>Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America</em> (Berkeley: U California Press, 1991), Chapters 1-2.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#3a">[3]</a><a name="3"> </a>Murray Pittock, ed., <em>The Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Europe</em> (London: Continuum, 2007).</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#4a">[4]</a><a name="4"> </a>Michel de Certeau, <em>The Writing of History</em> (1975), trans. by Tom Conley (New York: Columbia UP, 1988), Part I.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#5a">[5]</a><a name="5"> </a>Walter Scott, <em>Manners Customs and History of the Highlanders of Scotland</em> (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2004).</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#6a">[6]</a><a name="6"> </a>De Certeau elaborates this idea most fully in "The Historiographical Operation" chapter of <em>The Writing of History,</em> 56-113.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#7a">[7]</a><a name="7"> </a>I owe this formulation of the concept of mediation to Raymond Williams, <em>Marxism and Literature</em> (Rev ed.; Oxford: Oxford UP, 1978), 95-101, and Chandler, <em>England in 1819,</em> Chapter 4.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#8a">[8]</a><a name="8"> </a>That being said, if you have room in your syllabus for such a crash course, a text like Paul Hamilton's <em>Historicism,</em> 2nd ed (London: Routledge, 2003) offers an accessible introduction to the history of historicism and helpfully maps the complex intellectual terrain that contemporary historicist critics and theorists contest.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#9a">[9]</a><a name="9"> </a>Nancy Armstrong, <em>How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism, 1719-1900</em> (New Yok: Columbia UP, 2005).</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#10a">[10]</a><a name="10"> </a>The same kinds of questions can of course be arrived at profitably by representations of any other historical event. I privilege World War II on the practical grounds that most students have seen a WWII film and on the slightly more suspect historical grounds that the war's events are approximately as close to us chronologically as the Jacobite rebellions were for readers of <em>Waverley.</em> In my experience, it is hard for students reading older historical novels to access any sense of the proximity or distance that the events being recounted would have had for the novels' early audiences. While I by no means attempt to assert any kind of political or symbolic equivalence between our relationship to WWII and Scott's early audience's relationship to the Jacobite rebellions, I do try to use our current relationship to WWII as a kind of correlative structure of feeling for the experience of proximity those audiences would have felt to the events <em>Waverley</em> recounts.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#11a">[11]</a><a name="11"> </a>Gillray's image can be found online in the Tate Britain's online digital collection (<a href="http://www.tate.org.uk/">www.tate.org.uk/</a>); it is also the cover art for the Longman Cultural Edition of Jane Austen, <em>Northanger Abbey,</em> ed. by Marilyn Gaull (New York: Longman, 2004). A black-and-white reproduction of Cruikshank's print appears in Fiona Robertson's entry on "Novels" in Iain McCalman, ed., <em>An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age</em> (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999), 288.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#12a">[12]</a><a name="12"> </a>The text of the letter can be found at: <a href="http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/brablt16.html#letter88">www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/brablt16.html#letter88.</a></p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#13a">[13]</a><a name="13"> </a>Edgeworth's letter can be found in John O. Hayden, <em>Scott: The Critical Heritage</em> (London: Routledge, 1970).</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#14a">[14]</a><a name="14"> </a>Ina Ferris, <em>The Achievement of Literary: Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels</em> (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991).</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#15a">[15]</a><a name="15"> </a>Thomas Babington Macaulay, "History," <em>Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal</em> 47 (1828): 331-51.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#16a">[16]</a><a name="16"> </a>Walter Scott, "Dedicatory Epistle to the Rev. Dr Dryasdust, F.A.S., <em>Residing in the Castle-Gate, York"</em> (1819), in <em>Ivanhoe; A Romance,</em> ed. Graham Tulloch, Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 7.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#17a">[17]</a><a name="17"> </a>Ibid., 7, 9</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#18a">[18]</a><a name="18"> </a>Mark Salber Phillips, <em>Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740-1820</em> (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000)</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#19a">[19]</a><a name="19"> </a>Godwin's essay, unpublished in his lifetime, is reproduced as an appendix in both the Penguin and Broadview editions of Godwin's <em>Caleb Williams</em> (London, 1794).</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#20a">[20]</a><a name="20"> </a>Peter Wagner, "Anticatholic Erotica in Eighteenth-Century England," in <em>Erotica and the Enlightenment,</em> ed. by Peter Wagner (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), 166-209.</p>
<p class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#21a">[21]</a><a name="21"> </a>Hugh Trevor-Roper, "The Invention of Tradition: the Highland Tradition of Scotland," in <em>The Invention of Tradition,</em> ed. by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983), 15-42.</p>
<p><span class="notes"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/goode.html#22a">[22]</a><a name="22"> </a>Georg Luk&#225;cs, <em>The Historical Novel</em> (1937), trans. by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln: U Nebraska Press, 1983), Chapter 1.</span></p></div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31530">Pedagogies</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Resource:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/pedagogies/commons/novel/index.html">Novel Prospects: Teaching Romantic-Era Fiction</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-authored-by-secondary- field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Authored by (Secondary):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/person/goode-mike">Goode, Mike</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/murray-pittock" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Murray Pittock</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/robert-collingwood" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Robert Collingwood</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/katie-trumpener" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Katie Trumpener</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/george-cruikshank" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">George Cruikshank</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/walter-scott" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Walter Scott</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/james-fenimore-cooper" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">James Fenimore Cooper</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/maria-lovell-edgeworth" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Maria Lovell Edgeworth</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/james-chandler" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">James Chandler</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/michel-de-certeau" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Michel de Certeau</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/doris-sommers" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Doris Sommers</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/friedrich-meinecke" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Friedrich Meinecke</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/georg-luk%C3%A1%C3%A7s" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Georg Lukáçs</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-country-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Country:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/slovenia" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Slovenia</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/country/scotland" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Scotland</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/spain" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Spain</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-continent-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Continent:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/continent/europe" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Europe</a></li></ul></section>Fri, 29 Jul 2011 17:31:23 +0000rc-admin22209 at http://www.rc.umd.edu